The challenge of Internet delivery was, and remains, how to create an environment where remote students feel they are receiving the same level of attention and quality instruction as on-campus students. While it is straightforward to give all the students shared access to videos, discussion groups, course materials, and the like, it is much harder to accomplish the assessment aspect of course, testing. Of course, it remains more difficult to ensure that the taker of the test is the registered student when one cannot see the person at the other end. Video conferencing will be extremely helpful in providing individual help, and it may also be a way of ensuring some level of confidence about who is taking a test. These are but a few of the challenges.
Remote students can now view courses on the same day as on-campus students.
NetShow gives us the ability to produce affordable, high-quality video. If a professor mentions a URL in class, we can take the remote student directly to the Web page. These features enhance the experience for the students and give them a sense that they are part of a larger class. Now that IMCS students share a schedule with the students at Illinois, we are able to create a classroom community using WebBoard's chat rooms and discussion groups. For on-line quizzes, we recently used Lotus's Learning Space.