ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, universities and colleges have demonstrated substantial progress in using the Web to deliver courses. Educators generally agree that in any educational setting, the ability to tailor courses and course materials to individual students’ needs is desirable, and that these needs are determined by such factors as students’ previous knowledge of the subjects, their learning styles, their general attitudes, and their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. A skilled teacher will be able to achieve this goal in one-to-one interactions with learners, but not, as a rule, in the lecture hall/classroom settings typical of higher education. As well, a developer of traditional course materials will not be able to cater to an individual learner’s needs to any great extent. Web-based educational materials can potentially be much more flexible than traditional course materials because e-learning has the potential advantage of rapid access to distributed educational repositories for course authors and students.
