Exploiting value-added content in an online course

Online courses have proliferated across all disciplines in recent years. One commonly-used approach for creating an online course is to build a web site containing as much course information--assignments, solutions, lecture notes, streaming videos, and the like--as possible. The goal of this type of course is to replicate online, to the maximum extent possible, the classroom experience. Online courses built this way exploit the communications capabilities of networked computers. We believe, however, that online courses should also strive to exploit the computational capabilities of computers. That is, online courses should provide value-added components that make possible learning experiences beyond what is feasible in the traditional classroom. We describe such an online course, called Creating Interactive Web Content, that we created and have taught successfully for the last three years. It is a general enrollment course that uses HTML and JavaScript as a vehicle for teaching elementary programming concepts.