Control tutorials for software instruction over the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) has given educators unprecedented opportunities to provide information to students both within their own classes and around the globe. This paper describes the development and implementation of a set of Web-based tutorials for MATLAB, a popular computation and visualization software package. The potential impact of the WWW on pedagogical objectives is discussed, and the tutorials are presented as a case study of Web-based software instruction. Their structure and implementation are described, and feedback and statistics from the first academic year of use are shown. We also describe our efforts at disseminating information on the tutorials to increase their use. The paper concludes with a discussion of future work planned for the tutorials and potential future applications of the concept of Web-based tutorials.