Design of a Web-based education environment

Delivery of online education requires a robust environment for development of Web-based courses. Although commercial solutions for online course management exist, many universities choose to develop their own environments. The engineering school of the University of Louisville has developed such an environment. At the minimum, any online education system requires a Web server equipped with a database. Due to the authors´ familiarity with the PC, Windows NT Server and Access 97 were used. The database is used to store student names, user IDs, passwords, e-mail addresses, and grades. It also holds pointers to Web pages, arranged by course. Active Server Pages are used to communicate with the database, so that user HTML can be generated on the fly. Using the above as a baseline, the RAISE (Remote Asynchronous Instruction in Science and Engineering) environment was developed that provides such features as course registration, password protected logins, announcements, calendar, gradebook, class notes, syllabi, threaded conferences, interactive tutorials, and automated tools for creating online courses. This manuscript describes the design process and discusses those elements of the environment that are most and least effective in educational delivery, particularly with respect to using the environment as an adjunct to existing lecture-based engineering classes. The focus is on practical ideas and methods for design of online education environments.