Student response to the courseware has been very receptive. This is not a surprise since some of the initial impetus for the provision of on-line information came from student requests.
The courseware has been available for the whole of the parallel computing course. Student response to this was good. This was evident from the use it received during the course and from student responses - both informal verbal comments and from end of course questionnaires. Very little difficulty was experienced in using the system. It also has proven popular as a revision aid during examination times.
Formal student projects and studies have also been set up during the year with the aims of gauging student response and also to evaluate our work with relation to other WWW courseware.
The students themselves represented a small sample of the intended target audience for the ParTeach tutorials. These tutorials are deliberately aimed at students who have some understanding of basic computing principles, but who know nothing about parallel computing.
ParTeach proved very successful with the students, the extensive collection of useful example program fragments proving particularly successful. The ability to look at and run entire programs was also well received, although students felt that a much wider selection of available example programs would help improve ParTeach further.