Computer aided learning (CAL) has been a major research area for some time and consequently much courseware has been developed during this period. We do not intend to provide a complete survey of the field here, we will merely reference related material particularly in relation to the WWW.
Many areas have benefitted from computer developed courseware. Not surprisingly, most areas of computer science (particularly programming languages [10] and multimedia disciplines - computer graphics and image processing) have benefitted from this technology. Biological sciences and physics have also received some attention [6][3].
Until the advent of WWW courseware comprised of stand alone packages. These generally implemented hypertext type systems themselves. A recent example of this is Microcosm [3] developed at Southampton University for a PC running Microsoft Windows. This presents a framework for providing a given lecture course and allows the inclusion of text, images and video.
The Ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) courseware [10] package is an interesting development. It provides an online tutoring system for programming languages such as Pascal, C, C++ and Modula2. Ceilidh provides course notes and an integrated program development system that includes the automatic marking of programs. It has been adopted by many UK universities.
Over the past year a variety of courseware has appeared on the WWW. Many courses provide notes and lecture material in the form of HyperText textbooks - where sections of text are broken up into hypertext links that naturally reflect the layout of a book. Some have extended this work further to include links to other documents worldwide. Some level of interaction between the student and the course has also been facilitated.
One notable case is the Global Network Academy's attempt to set up a Usenet University Project[1]. Their long term goal is to set up a fully accredited on-line university. For the time being they are concentrating on developing and giving courses across the Internet. They employ WWW and other networking approaches (e.g. electronic mail and file transfer). They have developed a correspondence course in C++ which provides hypertext notes on the WWW and tutorials via email.
The Phoenix project [6] at the University of Chicago aims to develop an integrated academic information system providing full Internet connectivity and wide-area distributed hypermedia services for all teaching and research. They have developed a WWW system for teaching biological subjects that provide course notes, syllabus and announcements in a integrated environment that allows course instructors to convey this information in an easy manner.
One novel use of the WWW has been produced at the University of Geneva where they have produced a system that "animates" Pascal algorithms used in a data structures course[5]. This allows students to run programs (or program segments) and interact with the program execution to step through programs and examine contents of variables and data structures. Graphical representation of complex data structures is also provided.