| Introduction | System | Environment | Learners | Content | Resources | Teachers | Techniques | References |

A session made by Morten Flate Paulsen for the Teaching Over The Web Conference
Organized by the University System of Georgia, May 11-15 1998

4. The Course Content

To date, relatively little pre-produced course material is developed for online courses. Even though more and more content is developed for world wide web, much of the content material is adapted from existing text books, lectures or correspondence courses. More work must be done in the future to produce tailor-made material for online courses. Information technology allows the course content to be distributed and presented via CMC. Distribution via world wide web could be cheaper and more efficient than shipping course packages by land mail. Further, the web provide hypermedia and multimedia aspects that could give easy access to external resources and enhance learning.

The course content could be developed by a course designer or by the teacher. Anyway, it is considered as preactive workload, and one may assume that the course design will be of importance to the interactive teacher workload. Of special interest to this study are student assignments. The assignments are important tools to introduce the chosen teaching techniques. Presenting the assignment, the course designer or the teacher could explain whether the assignment for example is a search of online databases, an e-mail based correspondence study assignment, a case study, or an online debate.