By looking at the Project 25 Report and the report Assuring Quality in Distance Education we have distilled four points for discussion:

Faculty express concern about the time necessary for creating Web-based courses and interest in assistance with their design and implementation.

Concerns about student-to-student interaction deserve careful attention.

Questions concerning control of curriculum design and faculty autonomy must be addressed.

The development of courseware and the role of faculty as technology experts and mediators must be considered.

Keeping these points in mind, we'll take a brief tour of a piece of instructional courseware and one implementation of it in the service of online peer reviews.

This discussion relies on a resource page for a paper project in a graduate teacher training course. Of particular interest is the peer review module and deserving special attention are the interactions associated with the paper posted by Robin Kidd.

The review module contains the draft of Kidd's paper with links beneath it to several reviews. Looking through the reviews, it is possible to note several things:

Initial reviews follow the instructions for the assignment in a straightforward way. Of value is the ability to logistically share a paper and reviews using the Web module.

Another round of reviews for this paper develops, prompted by Paul Marchbank's second review in which he posts extended discussion of "acting."

Wayne responds to Paul's second review with another extended message relating to acting.

Wayne begins his message by suggesting that "Maybe we should start a discussion forum on this" (Wayne Peer Review).

Finally, the incorporation of the peer review input into the composition process is evident in the text and citations of Robin's revision of the paper.

Hopefully, these interactions reveal that there is a potential to enable student-to-student interactions by extending courseware that relies on packaged modules like discussion forums to also include more pedagogically designed tools like peer review modules. Perhaps a better meshing of tools with assignments and goals can alleviate some of the concerns relating to problems with student-to-student interaction.

However, merely providing instructors with extended packages, while perhaps providing a better fit with teaching goals, still may not address concerns of faculty roles in developing Web-based curricula. As long as tools such as peer review modules remain part of the entire package, instructor autonomy will be limited or may come at the price of extended effort at mastering technological skills.

To sketch an alternative model that enables instructors to use advanced tools, but still provides a sense of autonomy, we can consider the Instructional Tool Set and future plans for a Course Composer.

In the (almost) final analysis, better tools should include tools for course creation and design, tools that allow instructors to pick and choose with a rhetorical/pedagogical mindset.

But still, extending Web-based tools to provide more customized options driven by pedagogical goals is not the final consideration here. Recall Wayne's comment from his peer review: "Maybe we should start a discussion forum on this." To fully achieve student involvement and interaction via Web-based tools we might also consider the appropriate times for opening the course creation process to students as well. An exceptional distance education package will no doubt give instructors refined tools and autonomy, but also create avenues for student-created interactions.