The best way to get ideas for developing your own on-line course is by looking at courses others have developed. It's easy to find these on the Internet, by looking at the home pages of various campuses, professional associations, and other search tools. Following are samples of resources and courses to get you started:
National Directory of On-Line Courses:
World Lecture Hall: A comprehensive national directory of courses on the Web, organized by discipline, maintained at the University of Texas. This is a great place to start to see what's being done in your field.
Departmental listings:
Various professional associations and university groups maintain lists of departments in various fields. These are also useful starting points - if a department has courses on the Web, the department home page will typically include links to those. Here are a few examples:
English Department Homepages Worldwide: A list maintained by New York University.
History Departments Around the World: This list is maintained at George Mason University.
Philosophy Departments: A list maintained by the American Philosophical Association.
To find such a list in your discipline, try looking at the home page for your main professional society, such as the American Philosophical Association. If you don't know the URL ("Web-address") of your professional society, start with a search engine, such as Alta Vista.
Campus directories of on-line courses:
Many campuses have comprehensive listings of all the courses they have on the Internet. Many of these courses consist only of an on-line course syllabus, but some are more ambitious. These lists are another good starting point to see the range of possibilities for on-line courses. Almost all of these courses are partially-on-line; that is, course syllabi, assignments, readings, discussion forums, and other material are on-line, but students still meet in-person as in a traditional class.
Here are campus-wide listings from several campuses of The California State University:
Courses partially-on-the-Internet:
Here are a few examples of courses with on-line course materials. This is a very small sample of the hundreds now available in the CSU:
Engineering-Astronautics and Space: CSU Long Beach
Engineering-Computers, Ethics and Society: CSU Long Beach
English-Modes of Writing: CSU Bakersfield
General Geology: CSU Long Beach
Philosophy of Art: CSU Long Beach
Philosophy-Critical Thinking: San Francisco State
Courses entirely on the Internet:
Courses taught entirely on-line are the exception, not the rule, but they are growing in number. Here is an example from the CSU:
Northridge: Management Accounting
In addition, the CSU Digital Summer Session in 1997 includes several new courses which will be taught entirely on the Internet. The on-line catalog includes text descriptions of the courses, but (as yet) no links to the homepages of the courses themselves:
A respected, accredited college which has pioneered extensive offerings in the humanities taught entirely-on-line is the new School. For their on-line catalog of 60 classes for summer 1997:
The New School: DIAL On-Line Courses
Disciplinary resources:
When looking through professional and departmental listings, you will notice a few sites that are developing on-line materials of use in a variety of courses, such as images and text. Few faculty have attempted these, but they might give you ideas for resources you could develop in your discipline.
Religio: This on-line resource, developed at CSU Humboldt, gathers images, maps, and timelines for use in studying world religions. Most of the site is password-protected because of copyright issues, but you can see the home page, and the author of the site is very helpful in sharing ideas with faculty.
On-Line Training:
Many educational and commercial sites provide general information about how to use the Web. Of special interest for faculty is an on-line Interactive Learning Institute maintained at Cal Poly SLO on using the WWW to enhance education. The site includes links to other CSU on-line training sites.
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This page prepared and maintained by Julie Van Camp, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Copyright Julie C. Van Camp 1997. This Web page may be freely reproduced in any medium, so long as this complete copyright and permission notice is included with any such reproductions.
E-mail: jvancamp@csulb.edu
Last updated: April 20, 1997