Instructional and social dimensions of class web pages

THE REPORTED WORK is part of an ongoing qualitative study of faculty uses of the Internet at our institution. The goal of the present work is to categorize the functions of course Web sites from both researcher and faculty perspectives. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, we first analyzed the functions of 25 publicly accessible course Web sites. We then interviewed a subset of the sites' authors. We found that all sites performed course management functions which were valued by instructors; that a small subset also demonstrated easily implemented, successful, and pedagogically interesting uses of the Web; and that pages in our sample conveyed implicit and explicit social information to students about the class and instructor through four primary channels. We describe these findings and discuss their implications for teaching practice and for further evaluation research. © 1999 Springer.