Internet Distance Learning: The Problems, the Pitfalls, and the Future

The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta is in a unique position of having a campus located in the heart of the Lorraine region of France in the city of Metz. Since the number of faculty at GTL is limited, some courses must be offered in non-traditional formats. Due to the problems involved in shipping video tapes across the Atlantic, the Internet was considered as an alternative delivery vehicle. Initially driven by a very real and pressing need to deliver courses in a timely and effective manner across the Atlantic, Internet course delivery is now finding its way into many other programs at Georgia Tech. In this paper, we describe some of our experiences with Internet course development and delivery, and present a set of tools that we have developed for placing courses on the web easily. We will also present some of the problems and limitations with on-line course production and delivery, and speculate on the future of distance education.

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