Given our time constraint, the fact that student's lack of motivation tends to increase proportionally to the length of the course and that we have ``in place'' a Centre which offers courses of short-duration willing to take part and cooperate with our work, we have decided that courses of short duration would be more appropriate. Also, courses of short duration run more frequently and allow more opportunity for evaluating. Such courses are more frequently encountered on job training, whether in academia or in industry.
Locally we found a partner willing to contribute and participate in our research, the EPcc (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre). EPcc fulfils our requirements, it offers courses of short duration and most students have access to the WWW/Internet and are spread all over the world. We also found one more Institute which offers the same type of training as the EPcc does, the Cornell Theory Centre, New York. A local business company is also another promising case, and even though its course contents differ from the EPcc and the Cornell Theory Centre, it does fulfil all our requirements. And of course there are quite a few others, as mentioned previously, but, at this stage, we don't really know if they are willing to fulfil the Information Access requirement.
Interest in Distance Computer-Mediated Education and WWW is increasing everyday by an amazing ratio, and this is no exception in Scotland. Several departments within this university and Heriot-Watt University have projects on Distance Computer Mediated Learning, which leads us to believe that new opportunities will arise locally, generating additional sources to our research.