The outstanding success has been the WWW [World Wide Web] page I maintain for my courses, and particularly for Humanities 1504, an introductory level course devoted to the interplay between humanities, science, and technology. The URL [Uniform Resource Locator] for that page is:
http://truth.phil.vt.edu/courses/1504/1504.html First, all the information for the course is available here, including the detailed outlines from which I give my lectures, the paper topics, and even a substantial portion of the readings. Only the syllabus has been produced in paper form as well. This indeed has all the expected advantages--students get the information when they want, and if they lose it they are not dependent on me to have extra copies at the lecture. If I want to add a paper topic or a comment to a handout, I can put it on the WWW page and email the listserv to alert students to the new information there.
As important as the links in to course information are the links out to information on the Internet. Over Spring break Time magazine came out with a special issue devoted to cyberspace, which I very much wanted to use in this case. But I was at a loss on how to get the issue into the hands of my students on such short notice; there would be copyright hurdles, a delay while it was copied, phone calls to the bookstore, revision of the syllabus, etc. It looked like a real headache. I described the situation to my students, and a few hours after class received e-mail from one of them. The whole issue of Time was available on the Internet, he had discovered (why hadn't I thought of that, I had to ask!). Literally in a few minutes I added the links to the course homepage; students could then get the reading for the week, at their convenience and at no cost. We were set. Lest someone think this sort of thing is not likely to be repeated, they should consider the vast number of pre-prints, abstracts, articles, and discussions which appear first on the Internet, and months or years later on paper.
There are drawbacks -- there's a learning curve that may be steeper than for other applications, and maintaining the page is a daily job, as I've discovered. However, not a day goes by that that page is not accessed by one of my students, and as paper topics and tests approach I can see the steady stream of downloads. But it's allowed me to do things I could never do otherwise, and all in all it's been, believe it or not, a great deal of fun.
For additional information:
garyh@vt.edu