We needed to be able to build web-based courses to conduct this experimentation. We soon found that if these courses were to be pedagogically sound and rich with interaction, they required significant technical expertise, and were very expensive and time consuming to build. No wonder that at the time there were only a handful of web-based courses of any degree of sophistication. A lot has changed since then due to the advent of web-based educational tools like WebCT and others. Now web-based courses have reached the mainstream.
Most people have the required level of technical familiarity needed to cope with the existing tools.
But still, even if these tools were perfect and required no training or experience, there is still the matter of the time required to either create the course material, or to bring one's existing course material into a form worthy of public exposure. But it is entirely another thing to put ones notes up on the web, for all to see, print and critique. For me, putting my notes on line made me suddenly self-conscious of the faults and shortcomings contained therein. The upshot of all this is the fact that, for most of us, regardless of the tools being used, it takes time to build our on-line notes. We are left with a daunting task that tends to steer us away from experimenting with these technologies.