We have shown that CSCW tools for lectures and exercises are available. Course materials are being developed. The University of Aizu receives research grants for development of courseware. This lead to impressive results, but most of these projects are isolated and do not become integrated into a larger framework.
It is not enough to develop and apply online course material; maintenance needs to be provided. Software and hardware changes, and information becomes outdated. Online ``living'' documents might help to cope with rapid changes in computer science.
We hope to motivate teachers to invest a little bit more time and prepare course material with the extra benefit of being easily adaptable for additional classes and the whole community. Problems exist for reviews, stability, software and hardware changes, and portability.
Some teachers have concerns about developing online courseware for understandable reasons: like fear of giving something away and losing competitiveness, fear of being monitored or criticized, and fear violating copyright laws.
The issues addressed here will be discussed further in the project ``Designing a networked computer-based educational hyper-environment'' [Hua97].