As paper is still one of the most trusted and handy media, the system should support printing the entire or parts of a course including personal annotations. Social contacts are a crucial point in learning situations. Students should therefore be able to present themselves in a personal homepage with a photograph, a list of hobbies and other personal aspects. Such personal presentations are not toys, but they can help the students to get into contact even more easily than in live classroom situations. We distinguish between asynchronous and synchronous communication facilities.
Email is the most important asynchronous way for communication.
The system should also support group communications by offering discussion forums and shared workspaces where students can exchange documents. Probably a little bit less important is synchronous communication like shared whiteboards or audio and videoconferences. Although these are attractive gadgets, they require well equiped computer workstations and high bandwidth internet connections. It might also be difficult to use them in a didactically sensible way. Authoring As we said above, we cannot expect a WBC environment to serve as a content authoring tool.