Abstract

The Internet is becoming an important medium for the delivery of educational materials. However, relatively few institutions are delivering whole courses using this medium. More often, the technologies are used to complement traditional courses, which may be given face-to-face or at a distance (Farrell, 1999). The Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College, London, has been in the vanguard of the development of 'virtual education', providing some of the first accredited postgraduate courses in the UK to be offered entirely using the new technologies. For the past four years, we have been running an Advanced Certificate course entitled 'Principles of Protein Structure using the Internet'1 (Sansom, Walshaw and Moss, 1997) (PPS). See http://www.cryst.bbk.aauk/pps for more details. This was one of the first tutor-assisted, accredited, university-level courses to be taught entirely over the Internet, and is certainly the first in biochemistry in the UK.DOI:10.1080/0968776000080204

Highlights

  • The Internet is becoming an important medium for the delivery of educational materials

  • Nine (12 per cent of 75) came from students completing the course in 1996, 14 (26 per cent of 53) from those completing in 1997 and 21 (32 per cent of 66) from those completing in 1998. This improvement in response rate with students taking later courses probably just underlines the fact that students from earlier courses are more likely to have changed email addresses since completion

  • A large majority of students agreed with positive statements about the course

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Summary

Introduction

The Internet is becoming an important medium for the delivery of educational materials. Our students, who may come from any country, can study at home, at work or at college, and set their own hours of study This is self- true for more conventional types of distance education, delivered through paper-based and broadcast media. This way of providing education differs from traditional types of distance learning in that both delivery material and student-tutor interactions take place using only Internet and associated multimedia technologies. Tutors may use the interactive and multimedia functionality of the Web to set course-work exercises containing, for example, images of protein structures which the students are expected to manipulate. We have provided multiple-choice quizzes with instant feedback as self-assessment exercises (Figure 1)

International implications
Enabling technologies
Evaluation
Do you think that it was value for money?
What was yourjob position on starting the course?
Future developments
Full Text
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