Adapting the infrastructure provided by the World Wide Web for educational purposes

The World Wide Web provides a rich infrastructure for multimedia communication that is increasingly being exploited in the service of education. To date, this infrastructure has primarily been used for the delivery of course materials to students. Increasingly, however, attempts are being made to extend the functionality provided by the WWW to include support for all aspects of the learning process. This paper describes how extensions to the World Wide Web can be used to develop individual learning support tools which can then be combined to provide a suitable learning support environment for a particular educational task. Two approaches to the design of a web aware tool to support and capture electronic, multimedia dialogue about course material are described. The first is centered on the use of the Common Gateway Interface, the second on the use of Java. The relative merits of each approach are discussed and an example of a tool implemented by each method, the AnswerWeb and Organik, described.