commercially available kernels but do not believe that they are better than our system. We 

do not believe that a system the size of ours, or what ours will shortly be, can be 

comfortably accommodated on a commercial kernel. Some of our academics use WebCT 

or Top Class for their own courses and we will provide student links to these, but the 

university Virtual Campus will remain our own development. 

   <7> WWW plus CD ROM or WWW plus paper is the basic structure. Courses usually 

consist of a text based framework of information or textbooks, with the web used for 

synchronous or asynchronous communication. We use Microsoft products and 

Macromedia DreamWeaver. The Virtual Campus is written centrally by staff contracted 

by the Victorian Government. We don t believe that audio or video on the web are suitable 

for our type of student. 

Standard Administrative Systems 

There are a number of standard systems for administration and development of online courses. 

Some of them are listed below: 

   FirstClass (

http://www.softarc.com

) 

   Lotus Learning Space (

http://www.lotus.com

) 

   Next Generation Learning (

http://www.sybase.com

) 

   TopClass (

http://www.wbtsystems.com

) 

   Virtual U (

http://www.vlei.com

) 

   WebCT (

http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct

)  

   LUVIT (

http://www.luvit.com

) 

   Web Course in a box (

http://www.wcbinfo.com/

) 

   DisCo (

http://www.udd.htu.se/dl/

) 

Further information on these and other systems is available online. It is not the role of this 

analysis to recommend any standard system. There are many analyses of them on the Internet. 

For instance, University of Minnesota Digital Media Center provides a 40 page analysis of 

four systems in the Web based Authoring Tools Comparison Report 

(http://www1.umn.edu/dmc/portfolio/comparison/index.shtml). The analysis compares the 

systems with regard to: 

   information publishing, 

   interaction tools, 

   assessment tools, 

   access to centralized resources for teaching and learning, 

   ease of use, 

   technical features. 

However, the standard administrative systems that were mentioned in the interviews were 

FirstClass, WebCT, and Lotus Notes. The following statements included comments about 

FirstClass: 

   <38> The web is used for presentation, communication, and administration. The virtual 

classroom is located in FirstClass Intranet Servers integrated into the Web environment. 

Youandi GmbH delivers approximately 12 types of web based courses. Further courses 

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