© Copyright 2000 by Jerry Drake. The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Introduction

The proliferation of web-based delivery systems in higher education has generated a great deal of speculation about the kind of impact these products will have on teaching and learning. Designed around course management features, courseware applications such as WebCT and Blackboard offer faculty a relatively fast and easy method for creating a medium that mimics the activities of the conventional classroom.

Using a web browser to access the courseware, students can participate in bulletin boards, chat rooms, and web-publishing projects in an environment in which every page attempts to project a uniform "look and feel". In turn, faculty can track individual students' progress through "pages" of text by way of the course management database (a surveillence feature to which some students strenuously object). Being web-based means that all of this is done remotely — student and teacher are not confined by the time-space limitations of a scheduled classroom.

Much has been written about the flexibility web-based courses offer students in the pacing and sequencing by which they proceed through course content (Downs, Carlson, Repman & Clark, 1999). But very little is known about the impact of web-based instruction as it relates to the instructor's flexibility in teaching content.

One of the primary concerns that technology-adept faculty have about prepackaged courseware such as WebCT is the apparent constraints it places on their ability to adapt and improvise as they become more comfortable with web-based tools. Most users are content just to be able operate the WebCT environment without having to know HTML, CGI scripts, Java and a variety of other web programming languages that perplex and annoy our right-brain sensibilities. A relatively small number of faculty often characterized as "early adopters" can eventually see past the simple, prescribed applications of the tools in WebCT and Blackboard and wish to do more specialized kinds of teaching by capitalizing on the hidden assets of technology (Jacobsen,1998).

Instructional Cycles and Conditional Release