Worse, only very technically "wise" people, i.e. web server specialists, can setup, load with content, and maintain the educational web site and the education web content -- when the ordinary author or instructor tools in "the system" fail to do what is needed done. That is the classical 4-decades old archaic propriety, technically called a "closed-systems model". It is the common-place commercial software business model. But it is a software and systems development model theoretically to become obsolete in the mid 1980s and through the 1990s with the advent and increasing use of what is called technically "object oriented programming" (OOP) and "object oriented (system) analysis and design" (OOAD). But the commercial software and systems manufacturers and vendors "mutated" and "dumbed down" or "crippled" their use of OOP and OOAD so that they could continue end-user-addiction and their slow pace of innovation of their products.
And as for the end users, just TRY to get computer naive or computer phobic faculty to "author" those static instructional web pages even "simply" as supplemental material let alone as the only content for their courses. They must do so with the still not-so-user-friendly, expensive, commercial software word processing and web publishing tools that are "out there", and most widely in use. They are far less likely to take the time to easily research the "better methods" and software tools they could be using at low cost to create and edit the necessary multimedia content supplements to their "ordinary courses", let alone create an entire "distance learning" course exclusively for deliver via the Internet. So only the very computer "savvy" faculty -- the so called "early adopters -- tend to take the time and make the efforts necessary to web-publish or all of their course materials. Do they also have the time to instruct their less enthusiastic colleagues in such uses? Likely they do not.
So perhaps the evolving, primarily informative and later tutorial, content of the WebLearningTools Research web-site will advance the advent of greater "ease of use" of "better distance learning". That "better distance learning" will include increasingly more powerful course content authoring, content deployment, and student web tools. The learning content increasingly will be more dynamic and better tailored to the individual student's educational needs and their preferred learning styles at the moment of content use. And this PI hopes this web site will be accepting world-wide contributions to this web site in the form of new ideas, new projects, as well as comments and reviews of the site's existing content to make our "meager" efforts in these directions more efficient, effective, and appropriate for educators in all countries and for the more timely benefit of their students.
