A Course Project
developed in the HRD on-line course Training on the Internet,
offered by the University of Minnesota, 1996
Author: Iliana Nikolova,
University of Sofia, Bulgaria
March, 1996
The site Introduction to the Internet was developed for the purposes of the following project:
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Where I work - at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Sofia, Internet connection has recently become available. As always, there are network specialists and hackers who are already deeply involved in "Inter-networking" and their experience is growing and growing every single day. But for the majority of people Internet is still a magic. As the gurus are always busy, one would prefer getting his first lessons from the person next to him if the last happens to be one step ahead. So, often, when I sit behind my computer browsing the Web or e-mailing, there would usually be someone standing behind my shoulder: "Hey, I want to put my finger in this. Will you help me get started? It looks so attractive, but what can this thing do for me, actually, and what can I do with it?" So, I decided to develop a small Web site "Introduction to the Internet" which could help beginners to get an insight about the Internet and find answers to questions like: “What is it?”, “For what purpose can it be used?”, “What are the basic services it offers?” and, which is even more important - to "put their hands-on".
Students and teaching staff of the Department of Mathematics and Informatics - computer literate people (familiar with Windows, Windows applications).
PC and Mac labs are available, where Internet client software is installed, so the learners can use e-mail (Pegasus mail or Eudora), ftp, telnet, gopher and Netscape. They will work with the Web site in these labs at their own times and it is assumed that they would know how to start Netscape and browse with it.
After a purposeful use of the WWW site the learners will be able to:
Due to the specifics of the training - on user's demand - no formal evaluation of learner's achievements will be performed. Opportunity will be provided for the learners to get feedback by the instructor on their performance on the learning activities. Indirect conclusions about the effectiveness of the training could be drawn by the amount and nature of learner's "help-requests" afterwards.
The Web as a training platform provides opportunity for more learner's flexibility - to access the learning material in his own time and place and with his own pace, to choose his own way through the learning resources. Another asset is that the WWW offers a convenient way to access other on-line resources related to the topic of study. The opportunity to design an interactive site for training is of significant value too.
The topic of our training here is such, that it requires using the Web anyway - why not emphasising this by using the Web for both presentation and practice.