The course home page is also an entry point to the other on-line resources described below by means of ``clickable'' links.
Links to many examples of course Web pages are available at The World Lecture Hall.
However, not everyone is comfortable using e-mail and alternative contact methods should also be provided.
Discussion groups allow students to get faster responses to their problems since all other students may contribute answers. However, some students may feel intimidated by the public nature of discussion groups and may prefer to use e-mail.
There are several examples of Hypernews course discussion groups at California State University, Northridge.
The documents can be made prepared by scanning hand-written notes or by conversion of machine-readable formats such as ``Power-Point'' slides or word processor documents.
Material should only be made available in a widely-supported format such as text, HTML or PDF format to make sure it can be accessed by as many students as possible. Most programs will create files in these formats.
For lecture-based courses there may not be much advantage over providing photocopies. However, if the material is already in machine-readable form very little additional effort will be required to put the material on-line (simply ``printing'' the document to a file in a special directory may be sufficient).
Adobe has collected some examples of on-line educational PDF documents. PDF documents can be generated with Adobe Acrobat or the free Ghostscript software.
More extensive use of the internet is rarely worthwhile for a typical lecture course that already allows for personal interaction between students and the lecturer, opportunities for group discussion and hands-on laboratory work. However, there are more sophisticated tools that may be useful for very large classes, for distance education, or where the costs of developing the required materials can be recovered through fees or royalties. Some of these uses include: