During our readings, we came across several implementations and case-studies of the so called Virtual Classrooms on the Web, but none of them actually observed and interpreted the experiment and its outcome extensively, none of them were concerned with measuring the effectiveness of the utilisation of such a media as a distance learning environment. Perhaps this is the case because this is so far, a rather undefined problem, and here lies our challenge,measuring effectiveness of the teaching/learning process in a Computer-Mediated environment, in particular, over the WWW/Internet.
Our aim will be to study Distance Computer-Mediated-Education, specially when WWW/Internet is the medium being utilised. We hope to achieve this by collecting data from the various ongoing projects, such as GNA, Diversity University, Virtual Online University, Heriot-Watt's University Institute for Computer-Based Learning, Open University UK, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Cornell Theory Centre, amongst others identified in our readings, and possibly to formulate questionnaires according to the nature of the project and distribute them via e-mail to the students/lecturers/tutors and to project's participants. Most of them are now at the stage of introducing the multi-media capability to their environment, and have passed the asynchronous/synchronous purely text-based stage on their projects, so we expect to, at least, obtain the results/data for this part.
At this stage it is crucial that we have the ability to choose between the different parameters, the ones that will directly or indirectly measure the outcome of our results.