(InService). 

The web is used for teaching and tutorials. They don t place materials on the web but use 

threaded web pages for chat pages and web conferences in real time with the students typing 

in their contributions   the only delay is the typing as it comes up on the ICQ system. The web 

is used together with other media: audio, text based, and teleconferencing. 

The web is used for interactivity. No video clips, but central university facility will assist in 

this. They use Netscape and our IT people produce our own database system from that. 

The web is used for one online, one to one, one to many, and many to many communication 

with threaded web pages for student communication and Internet resources for student 

research. 

They are developing tutoring systems and using hyperlinks to other web sites and between 

students, captioned  have you seen this? . 

There are no web based assignments. All by projects which are print based. They don t like 

assessment on the web and are conscious of security issues. Continuous assessment is 

preferred to examinations. 

The Ph.D. is almost totally on the web. The B Ed (In service) is available on the web in some 

subjects. The B Ed has a fixed start and a fixed finish. The Ph.D. is flexible throughout. Same 

costs as any other higher education degree in Australia. Basically $50 per point for a 36 point 

degree is $1800. 

From what the interviewee has seen, there are a lot who want to use the web, both students 

and staff. He has just done two evaluations and it works. The trouble is that staff are not 

getting the training and staff have real problems teaching on the web without the necessary 

training. This is seen in the context of further rationalization in Australian higher education in 

which most universities have lost a lot of staff. Students have serious problems of access and 

staff do not know how to use the web. 

Subject Areas 

In the CISAER fill in form, the question about the curriculum areas of courses using web was 

open ended. Consequently, the answers were interpreted and coded by the researcher, and it 

was not always obvious which category the reported curriculum areas belonged to. The 

courses were categorized according to the subject areas provided in the specialties list of 

National Science Foundation s Survey of Earned Doctorates July 1, 1997, to June 30, 1998. 

The same categories were used by Paulsen (1998, 139) in a survey of 150 online teachers and 

the courses they taught online. 

As shown in Table 7, the courses in the survey are dominated by courses in Computer and 

information sciences or Mathematics (56 institutions), Professional fields (45 institutions), 

Humanities (36 institutions), and Education (34 institutions). The professional fields cover a 

number of areas including Business Management, Communications, Law. Similarly, the 

humanities cover a wide range of subjects including courses in museumology, language 

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