Most of the templates are simply starting points and can be modified and augmented relatively easily. One advantage of templates is that they serve to provide a common look and feel to courses, and usually insure that a course meets certain graphic design standards. They also enable an instructor to incorporate options the instructor might not have considered or might have felt were too difficult to incorporate. In some cases, templates can reduce the server load and access time for dial-up students by frugal use of code. Instructors might consider including search tools in their courses to ease student navigation through the entire course or through threaded discussions.
Some products allow students to create their own student homepages .
This feature can be useful for posting workgroup or individual projects. Students log in and generally communicate through typed text. Everyone taking part in the discussion sees on their screens the typed comments of everyone else in the discussion, with each comment usually preceded by the student s name. With more than 3-5 students, synchronous discussions take on a chaotic nature, as responses to comments don t appear on others screens until the response sender s enter key is pressed. Additionally, unless the product has a session log feature, there is no text record of the discussion.