The authors developed class resources web pages for their classes, in which the students may access lecture notes, study tips, practice test questions, office hours, announcements, and so forth. They may also use the links in the class pages to find additional web sites of interest. Furthermore, they have used a proprietary web-based computer conference system to link their students, enabling them to engage in remote collaboration. This creates a 24x7 virtual classroom discussion in which anyone can participate even if they are normally shy. Or a user may simply read the comments of others without contributing.
Students can also post their project reports online to be graded and read by others.
The MeetingWeb TM is an asynchronous computer conferencing system which provides asynchronous textual communication capabilities to its users. Figure 1 shows a representative screen of the MeetingWeb TM conference system. The interface is the system for most users. MeetingWeb TM was designed to have a familiar look and feel to users of the World Wide Web, a new standard platform for computer communications. Characteristics of the system other than its ability to facilitate communication between team members did not appear to be a factor in the study.