Web-based organization of relevant knowledge for web-oriented instruction and learning

This paper presents the author's subjective experience in developing and using a combination of web pages and other Internet attributes (called the Internet learning environment, ILE) for a sequence of four dependent university courses, three at undergraduate level. Relevant knowledge is taken to mean all constructs that constitute the material taught in the courses and their prerequisites. Constructs include the various facts, relations, definitions, notation, equations, figures, executable computer models, sound-bites, video, images, applets, expert experience, and connections. Even though randomly (perhaps chaotically) distributed around the web and Internet, they can be presented as if arranged in a database, structured like the official curriculum. Organization of relevant knowledge is fundamentally important because computer environments change so fast that the knowledge base may have to be restructured or moved to new servers several times a year. By presenting the overall curriculum graphically, web-page content appears to be multi-hyper-linked to a structured database, which changes rather rapidly, for example with breaking news. Frequently, breaking news may provide unusually good teaching and learning opportunities. General types and formats of relevant information on the ILE are listed. Characteristics of good teaching obtained from the literature are related to attributes of instruction and learning based on the ILE. Finally the lessons learned by the author in developing the ILE are arranged in the form of simplistic "rules".