The Ed Center opened on SDSU campus October 10, 1997. At this time, we aslo employ 5 student assistants. We have focused on such tools as VRML, Java applications, digital libraries, web-based collaborative environments, protein data banks, etc. We inaugurate today Ed Center's seminar series, with a presentation on collaborative Web-based technologies. The evolution of the Internet and the World Wide Web, with its hypertext and multimedia capabilities, essentially redefined the whole concept of teaching at a distance.
Many university courses use the Web to supplement classroom instruction.
Instructors place on the Web course syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, maintain discussion forums, etc. There is a lot of literature summarizing this development from pedagogical as well as technical perspectives. Resources for distance education is an excellent collection of relavant links maintained by Professor Charles Darling, Capital Community-Technical College, Hartford, Connecticut. Special software has been developed to efficiently archive and retrieve lecture materials, including video and audio recordings. A white paper about WLS by Richard Klevans is accessible here.