The Web is great not just for putting information at our fingertips, but for actual education. I mean, the Web's freaks and cranks and amateurs are indispensable, but often the stuff they dig up is like a buffet with only desserts and condiments—not well assembled and not complete nourishment. The real main courses are served at colleges.
College Web sites, like colleges themselves, vary a lot. Some are just a set of dusty faculty home pages with broken links. But the potential is huge. Nothing beats a top university with its libraries, labs, databases, and faculty for sheer live mental RAM and data for it to crunch. Delivering this intellectual asset via the Web could be like . . . like giving everyone a second external brain.
Geology Led the Way
One early leading-edge Web site for college instruction happens to be an Earth science site, the University of British Columbia's Earth and Ocean Sciences (EOS) Department. Since 1994 the department has been building courses in geologic subjects that are solid foundations for teaching. Most colleges are doing this, but UBC's effort has been special.
What built the original site was dozens of students, earning academic credit for the sites they created, with faculty providing the content and quality control. The other essential ingredient was a dedicated overseer with a vision, a plan, and the energy to ensure funding and continuity. That person is Dr. Michelle N. Lamberson, who was given a gold star—the 1997 Educom Medal—by the Geological Society of America for her work on the site.
A decade later, the site has been dismantled, naturally, for something new and truly improved. But pieces of it remain in the new Teaching and Learning Resources section of the UBC Web site. Now faculty members build the Web sites, and the students stay busy blogging or building Facebook pages, or possibly studying.
Building Content in Blocks
The building blocks of the EOS site are stackable modules of knowledge, designed to be useful to many different instructors teaching many different subjects. For instance, students can access an image bank as well as field trip guides.
A nice illustration of how to concentrate learning in a Web page is a diagram of the Canadian coastline, showing every type of environment occurring there—beach, riverbank, levee, and so forth. Each type is linked to photos of the rock types that result from the sediments laid down in that setting. The picture of the coast, in fact, is a reconstruction from the rocks of northeastern British Columbia. It helps teach a central skill of the geologist, which is building pictures of ancient landscapes from clues in the rock rubble they leave behind. It deserves better than its dry title, "Clastic Sedimentary Environments."
Until 2002, the online course sites lived there too. They tried some innovative things such as home pages and within-class e-mail for all students, plus a chat room and a bulletin board for student-teacher dialog and messages. You could get a guest account and poke around there yourself. These free-wheeling experiments have matured into a simpler and more robust form that you can see at the current course server. Most colleges use similar setups nowadays.
PS: There's a whole industry of serious Web-based education, or distance learning, growing out there. The Edutools site compares dozens of different online course management products.
