Technological overkill.

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There's probably some sort of technological law of nature involved in this. It appears that anyone who's going to invest the effort in preparing a tool for generating a web-based course isn't going to be satisfied with just providing the framework for entering materials. Why not add a tool for verifying that students have visited the proper pages (and why not arrange things so that access to certain pages is possible only after students have accessed previous pages?), or a tool for testing what students have learned, or even an all-seeing eye that can generate a full-fledged report on what materials in the site the student has accessed, and when. And if all of these are possible, then why not?

I haven't devoted extensive research to the subject, but I've asked a quite a number of people who have built and/or taught courses with tools of this sort. Despite the hype around how tools of this sort essentially convert your site from a collection of materials into a real course, none of the people I've spoken to have reported that they've ever put any of these extras to use.

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Go to: What's a nice constructivist like you doing in a site like this?