Friday, August 10, 2001

Web Portal Adds Free Course-Management Tools to Its Offerings By BROCK READ Yahoo, the popular Web portal, has tossed its hat into the online-learning ring, opening Yahoo Education, a Web site that provides course-management tools and reference materials for college and grade-school classes. One noteworthy feature of the service is something it does not include: a charge. Professors and students will see advertisement banners on the Yahoo site, but otherwise it costs them nothing. Blackboard.com also offers instructors a free Web-site-creation service. Other software from Blackboard and WebCT, another major provider of online-course tools, is marketed to institutions. The site -- which opened on Tuesday -- marks Yahoo's first foray into higher education. The new service will cater to individual professors, according to Catherine Davis, the producer of Yahoo Education. But she adds, "We've had quite a bit of interest from universities." On the site, instructors create course pages that allow them to post class rosters, calendars, and syllabuses; communicate with students through message boards and e-mail; and assign readings and collect course work. The pages can be left open to the public or restricted to registered class members. In addition, a reference desk of sorts includes links to a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a handful of other books such as Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and Henry Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body. Yahoo developed the section through partnerships with three content providers -- the Houghton Mifflin Company and Bartleby.com, which provide their material free, and Britannica.com, which offers users a two-week trial subscription. Yahoo decided to create the online-education branch six months ago, says Ms. Davis, "but we've been looking into this area for quite some time." The development team for the project consisted of current and former classroom instructors from schools and universities. Test versions of the site were submitted to what Ms. Davis calls "field research and usability studies" in school and college courses. She said she could not disclose the names of the trial institutions. Ms. Davis sees Yahoo Education as a supplement to the lecture hall, not a replacement for it. "The goal was to create a support for the actual classroom and community," she says, while acknowledging that the site might also support distance-education ventures. "I know that it will also be used as a virtual community." Yahoo's move into online education is, in part, a response to demographics. "We're targeting the needs of 13- to 22-year-olds," says Ms. Davis. Additionally, professors and students had begun to use Yahoo's meeting rooms and search engine for course material, she says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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