[Electronic Curriculum] [Implementation] [Title page]
Dissemination on Internet
How can we best put the electronic materials described above into the hands of the student? Since multimedia files require hundreds of megabytes, distribution by floppy disks is not feasible. The usual way to distribute large files is on CD-ROM. This kind of distribution is inexpensive and information can in principle be easy to access. Among the disadvantages of CD-ROM are that the content is fixed at the time of manufacture, and a student would have to have a CD-ROM reader on his or her computer. Surveys at our university centers reveal that about 30% of students in introductory chemistry brought a computer to campus, and of those, about 20% have a CD-ROM.
We have been exploring the feasibility of distributing our electronic curriculum through a World Wide Web (WWW) site. A WWW site would typically store the multimedia and text files on a large capacity hard disk on a server computer. The files could then be accessed through the Internet by a browser (such as Mosaic or Netscape) running on a student's or instructor's computer.
Multimedia chemistry resources currently exist on the WWW. For example, movies of reactions of many elements on the periodic table can be accessed at the University of Texas, Austin, site [2], and modules to assist in instruction of a variety of undergraduate chemistry courses are available from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute site [3]. Sites such as these are valuable resources, but are viewed primarily as ancillaries to the traditional chemistry curriculum. Our goal is more far-reaching. We wish to design a new chemistry curriculum, and view multimedia modules distributed on the WWW as a means to that end. There are several advantages to a WWW site. The amount of material is limited only by the hard disk space of the server, which is relatively inexpensive at $0.25-$0.75 per megabyte. A WWW site is platform-independent, and browsers have been written for the major computing platforms. Access to the electronic curriculum would be available anywhere in the world there is access to the Internet. A WWW site could also provide a uniformity in chemical education throughout a university system, a uniformity that would ease transitions from, for example, two- year colleges to four-year colleges.
Since the files reside at a single networked site, they could be easily updated with current topics, or as a result of editing by various authors. This is advantageous in the development process, because contributors at remote sites could write and edit files, and view and distribute the results, both easily and rapidly. Furthermore, a "new and noteworthy" section in the electronic curriculum could be easily updated with current topics by adding files to the WWW site. To prevent total anarchy and maintain consistency, an editorial board would be set up to review and edit files before they were added to the site.
There are several disadvantages to a WWW site, including lack of universal Internet access and somewhat complicated configuration of user machines. Because rapid advances in technology are moderated by SUNY budgetary constraints, it is difficult to predict in our university system when or if students will have universal, easy and rapid access to the Internet. The difficulty in configuration could be eased somewhat by writing configuration programs a user could download that would set up browsers on his or her own particular kind of computer.
A major disadvantage of disseminating the electronic curriculum on the WWW is loss of interactivity. The WWW was initially set up to deliver various kinds of files to client computers; it is up to the client computer to run local programs to view the files appropriately. For example, the structure of a molecule can be served as a text file to a client computer; the client computer can view and rotate the molecule in real time using the program RASMOL. To emulate interactivity, the server software would have to launch programs that would output html files back through the server to the client computer. Many simultaneous requests for interactivity from the WWW site could bog down the server. For this reason, programs for local computers should be written to access a WWW site but process information locally. An example of this approach is Mathsoft's Mathbrowser [4] that can access a Mathcad file on a WWW site and manipulate the file locally without Mathcad being present on the local machine.