Students should be encouraged to use this technology to explore their own understanding by repeated access to questions, exercises, and quizzes, without the fear that such experimentation will affect their grades in the course. I am thinking here of the difficulty I had creating erroneous options for many questions. Credible wrong answers are crucial to the success of an instructional design such as mine, because they give the instructor an opportunity to identify specific errors in the student's thinking, and to correct them in the response. That design strategy should work, as long as the option is crafted in such a way as to seem a likely answer to someone with that misunderstanding. I like to think, as a result, that working on the Web page made me a better classroom teacher, at least for a semester or two, by making me more aware of the dynamics in student-teacher exchanges.
Integration is another issue of importance for online course design.
Because hyperlinked interactivity is the central avenue for immediate positive and negative reinforcement in an asynchronous learning model, it is important that such links be fully integrated into the instructional materials. Though there is certainly a place for the delayed interactivity of stand-alone exercises, reviews, and quizzes, an initial round of interactive asynchronous learning should be integrated into all instructional texts. Even asynchronous projects can benefit from the variety of communication options now available on the Internet, including e-mail, listservs, chatrooms, and bulletin boards. When utilized effectively, such communication can give a student more direct and more convenient access to the instructor and other students, and can make student contributions more formal, thoughtful, and precise. However, use of these technologies also carries some warnings.