Engaging students with active learning resources: hypertextbooks for the web

The World Wide Web has mesmerized educators for over a decade now with its tacit promise of platform independent, universal educational resource delivery. Indeed, many useful and exciting educational tools and distance learning courseware have been developed for the Web. On the other hand, some of the really fascinating educational resources— envisioned some years ago—remain elusive. One of these is the active learning hypertextbook. In this paper we discuss the concept of an active learning hypertextbook, pointing out the state of the art, the technical problems to be surmounted, and our own research and development leading to hypertextbook resources in the Webworks Laboratory at Montana State University.