Introduction   

Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est. ¹

Anonymous

The World Wide Web (WWW) enables text, images, sound, movies and software to be delivered to any computer on the Internet [von Konsky 1996] . Although it has existed for only a short while [Berners-Lee et al 1994a] the web has grown quickly when measured in terms of the proliferation of servers and the number of individuals accessing the immense quantity of information available [internet solutions 1996; Pitkow and Recker 1994] . The web is used extensively for entertainment, commerce, research, and education, although it is the latter of these that will be the focus of quality issues discussed in this paper [von Konsky 1996; NCSA 1994; WWW95 1995; WWW95 1995]. Those interested should see the special educational reference section at

http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~raytrace/papers/ap97/html/educational_references1.html. 
 

Web technology effectively makes each individual with direct server access a global information publisher. This has had two significant results. First, individuals now have free and immediate access to an immense amount of data which was not previously available or easily accessible, including that with extensive creative content. Second, the quality controls imposed by traditional commercial publishing houses and peer reviewed journals do not apply, resulting in an abundance of Web pages containing information of limited quality or relevance.

Many sites do attempt to provide information of value to the reader including some academic home pages, research pages [turn off images] and those providing access to search engines such as WebCrawler, Lycos, SavvySearch and Altavista. Unfortunately, a vast majority of other sites contain trivial information with neither form, nor significant content nor permanence. This quality spectrum holds true for online courses as well.

Hancock, Carr, and Hall (1995) report on the state-of-the-art in electronic journal publishing but their results can be generalised to other forms of electronic publishing including online course material. They consider:

searchability : infinite cross-referencing/indexing via a search engine

hypertext: links to other multimedia documents

annotation: allows readers to make comments about the articles

electronic notification: readers are informed when a new article or issue is available

The first three features are very relevant to online courses and will be investigated later as they contribute to the perceived quality of the material. It has also been noted that quality in any publication can be broken down into the categories of Content, Presentation, Non-linear learning and Multimedia [Marriott and Ng 1996]. However, proper design [Bieber and Isakowitz 1995] is often subjugated to commercial needs which over-rides the relevance or the motivation for presenting information in a given format [Ciolek 1996a].

Some feel that the quality of Web-based information will improve with the passage of time and experience. It is more likely, however, that improving the quality of Web pages will require:

a conscious effort on the part of content providers to strive for quality of both form and content;

a conscious effort on the part of policy makers in viewing the Web as a source of quality information;

an understanding of the specific needs and demographics of information users;

guidelines set by sponsoring organisations and institutions based on sound research and the observations of past successes and failures [Lilley 1995] .

It therefore seems prudent to analyze the success and failure of past and present Web-based courseware in meeting or exceeding the benefits of traditional approaches to education. Similarly, the anticipated benefits of future advances in WWW technology should also be considered to assist in setting research agendas providing a growth path for this emerging educational medium.