The use of the world wide web in learning and teaching in higher education: reality and rhetoric

This article reports major themes emerging from 41 semi-structured interviews conducted with staff from one 'old' and one 'new' university in England about the use of the web in teaching and learning for campus-based students. The research set out to explore real-life instances of the use of the web in teaching and learning to determine the relationship between this reality and the rhetoric surrounding the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in universities. The focus of this paper is the motivations and/or barriers to adopting the WWW in teaching and learning at the institutional and individual staff level. The paper concludes by stressing that while there may be great potential for the use of ICTs for some aspects of teaching and learning, adoption of these new technologies is not straightforward; and, in the cases studied here, the use of the web in teaching and learning neither appears to be radically transforming teaching and learning within the university, nor to be providing (or even regarded as) a ready solution to the problems the sector currently encounters.