Desktop Distance Education: Personal Hosting of Web Courses

Abstract

Many instructors are quickly turning to the World Wide Web (WWW) to host the materials and interactions for both distance education and classroom-bound courses. Desktop hosting of WWW-based course materials is becoming a feasible alternative to institutionally provided central servers. Moreover, emerging software is making personal hosting easier and more cost effective than hosting with large courseware shells on central servers. The pros and cons of the institutional versus personal approaches involve pragmatics, academic freedom, intellectual property rights, and interface design. It is argued that desktop hosting provides instructors with a greater sense of control over and ownership of the course and a greater flexibility to design their own course at all levels from the organization of the materials to the layout of the interface. HyperCourseware™ provides a case in point.