One of the papers presented in this session proposed a different approach to distance learning on the Web. Their argument was that as up to now, all distance learning on the Web has been implemented in a learner-centred way, ie, the learner does all the activity, whereas the teacher generally does not exist. They introduce a a new concept, where teachers set up a learning group, and learners can connect to these groups and take part in the group activity. For this purpose, they came up with an architecture and a protocol do implement this distance learning model on the Web. The architecture is one of a slave/master relationship, where the master is the teacher, and the slaves are the students taking part in this specific group. The protocol is divided into 3 categories: group repository interface, responsible for data manipulation within group's database; per-group interface, takes care of individual connections between master and slave; synchronous navigation interface, controls synchronous navigation, which is controlling master's guidance of on-line slaves in real-time, such as accessing new resources on the web, scrolling, highlighting, etc.
Another of the papers presented in this session aimed at educators whose lack of technical background might interfere in making the best use of the Web for creating WWW-based courses. The authors describe an environment, Web-CT, developed that supports the creation of courses, thus enabling educators to fully use all the Web/Internet facilities. Web-CT uses the Web as an interface for creating WWW-based courses. This is achieved by using forms, html (if author knows how to write in html), plain text, and incorporating a set of tools, such as navigation, glossary, reference, index generation, bulletin boards, chat, timed-quiz, student self-evaluation, e-mail, annotation tools.
Web-CT seems to be a very rich environment for creating Web-based courses, in one hand, it provides enough tools such that you can create your own style of course, but in the other hand, it has its course design underlying model, which definitely limits one's creativity on designing and implementing a course.