Not long ago, several of my graduate students* and I were sitting around brainstorming.  Our topic: "in the future, what features would you like to see on instructional web sites?"  I thought several of the ideas we generated were interesting, so I've described a dozen of them below. 

1. Three-dimensional "virtual reality":  In a scene from the movie "Disclosure", Michael Douglas uses a virtual reality workspace.  Wearing special goggles and gloves, and walking on a treadmill, it appears to him as though he is really "inside" this environment; he has to "touch" file cabinets to rifle through them, etc.  We want to lose ourselves inside the web site the same way we do at a good cultural or sporting event.   Actually, we yearn for "Star Trek" holodecks, but for now we'll settle for 3D chat rooms with avatars. 

2. Duplex audio voice-over-IP:  in plain English, this means that "chatting" by typing is for the birds.  Why can't we talk to each other just like a conference call?  Actually, this technology already exists but is either expensive, hard to use, or requires special software plugins.

3. While we're wishing for voice chat, why not include webcam pictures as well?  Moreover, the program should be capable of showing all the participants' video windows on a single screen.  Most people don't have the high-bandwidth Internet connection necessary for this, but it's coming.

4. Application sharing for collaboration: Instructional web sites need to go beyond the novelty of a shared whiteboard into the realm of sharing applications used to perform useful work.  Microsoft's free "NetMeeting" software does this:  it allows people at different locations to simultaneously collaborate on the same document (provided they're Microsoft Office documents, naturally!).  However, in our experience, the learning curve for this program is still rather steep. 

5. Idea-mapping software that permits students to collaborate with each other in real time.  The "CMap" software used by NASA and others is a step in the right direction.

6. Access via wireless mobile devices (e.g., web-enabled cell phones, Personal Digital Assistants).  Of course, you won't be viewing full-motion video on your cell phone for quite some time.  Still, the idea is that we shouldn't have to be tied to our workplace, school lab, or home computers in order to participate in an online class.  For all the proliferation of notebooks, PDAs, and cell phones, the fact remains that most people still cannot access the Internet from most places outside their offices.

7. Wireless wearable "iglasses": while we're at it, why limit ourselves to PDAs?  Ever since we saw an IBM commercial featuring a seemingly daft fellow, wearing a curious glowing monocle, sitting on a European park screaming "Sell! Sell!" as he traded stocks online, we've wanted our wireless web access to be like that.

8. Speech recognition with voice commands:  Professors are generally good typists, so we're out of touch with the fact that the average person on the planet can't type worth a darn.  After years of hype and disappointments, speech recognition software is finally getting close to being useful (especially when trained for an individual speaker).  While we're at it, we want online help to be voice-enabled, too: let us speak our questions, then get videotaped answers pulled from a database. 

9. Speech software should also flow both ways: we'd like text-to-speech capability that doesn't use artificial "computer-sounding" voices.  For example, read our class discussion board messages to us while we're commuting, or let us hear our textbook or our instructor's course notes over an earplug attached to our cell phone.

10. Interactive tutorials: today's instructional web sites tout their interactivity.  But what, really, do they mean by "interactivity"?  The ability to interact with other people via the web site using email, chat rooms, discussion boards, whiteboards, and online testing.  We want more.  We want to interact with the web site as well as other students.  We want tutorials that play like video games (heck, that are video games!).  We want to be able to take different paths through the material, and we want the program to respond to us as individuals.  A long time ago (in computer years), Artificial Intelligence researcher Joe Weizenbaum's "ELIZA" program simulated a psychotherapist so convincingly that many people were willing to interact with it as if it were a person.  Why can't the web site have intelligent "agents" to greet us, tutor us, help us with research, even crack an occasional joke based on their constantly-updated knowledge of us?  Mind us, we certainly don't want to reduce interactions with our professor or fellow students---we just want accessing the web site when no one else is there to be less lonely.

11. Access to huge interconnected system of libraries online.  Libraries should get together in consortiums and pool their resources.   This has already happened in a few states, but this needs to be expanded to nationwide (or even worldwide) status.

* Special thanks to M. Khan, Alexis Chung, Shariq Ahmed, and Nam-Chun Hur.

 ©2001 Dr. Robert S. Bramucci