[*] http://www-ra.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/publikationen/2000/iti2000.pdf :
Starting as a scientific document exchange medium, the World Wide Web has become today’s most rapidly growing, biggest and most popular service on the Internet, and established itself as the de facto standard for on-line information interchange. Moreover, in perception of most people, it is the Internet. The reasons behind its surprising success are certainly numerous, but in our opinion the most important are:
Simplicity: anybody could learn enough HTML in an afternoon to build his own home page.
affordability: free browsers, no expensive development tools needed and cheap access.
* Timing: as the WWW appeared, computers were already popular and widely used, in offices as well as at home.
Universities, being research as well as educational institutions, were among the first to actively use the WWW. From using it only as an exchange medium for scientific documents, over publishing general information like lecture timetables and application procedures, they now increasingly regard the Web also as an educational medium. Many different concepts for Web-based or Web-supported education are being developed and tested but, so far, no standard model has emerged. Although there is no shortage of corresponding software, none seems to be convincingly superior from a didactical, technical or marketing point of view.
... online classes [links] online.vtheatre.net = classes.vtheatre.net