For students at the University of California, Los Angeles's College of Letters and Science (CLS), learning has taken on a new dimension this quarter-a cyberdimension. Each one of the roughly 1,000 courses that the college offered during the quarter had its own home page on the World Wide Web. But the concept of Web-based courses, made mandatory at CLS as of September 25, has drawn plenty of controversy. It has also spurred the growth of a cottage industry-the preparation of course home pages-that may develop into a significant cost center for college-level education.
The idea of a home page for individual professors is scarcely new, nor is the concept of Web pages devoted specifically to individual courses. But the administration at UCLA believes that CLS is the first organization to require home pages for all courses across an entire term's curriculum. Within that requirement, professors have almost complete freedom in ...
