Supporting educational activities through dynamic web interfaces

The Web is used for many purposes in education, such as the publication of course management information, centralized distribution of course materials , and supporting on-line discussions between instructors and students or am ong the students themselves, Leveraging off the Web for educational activit ies both inside and outside the classroom produces a dynamic educational re pository. In this paper, we present work that explicitly attempts to connec t in-class activity, in the form of multimedia, Web-accessible captured lec tures, with collaborative discussion spaces, flexible and dynamic interface s for the captured lectures and the discussion spaces are presented, as wel l as specialized interfaces that connect the two. We discuss our experience in a recent course taught using this integrated and dynamic educational re pository and explain how our experience has lead to some solutions for visu alizing the changes that occur over this rich space. (C) 2001 Elsevier Scie nce B.V. All rights reserved.