A Web-based Instruction System to support design activities in Architecture

Starting from the analysis of the potential of New Technologies in the Architectural field, with major interest in the educational sector, and considering the limitations of traditional university teaching, we have designed a Web-Based Instruction (WBI) system as a teaching aid in the Italian Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering. The WBI system, which integrates a hypertextual informative network with communication and collaborative tools, presents two important innovative features; firstly, it provides specific tools to manipulate the information contents of the Web pages; secondly, authorised users can modify the information network in the system. Indeed, the possibility of extending the web-based hypertextual network dynamically gives rise to many research questions, which have been tackled at the design phase. In this paper we report on the designed Web-Based Instruction system, with the focus on the scalability feature of the system and on the related mechanisms which have been developed. Even if the system has been designed with a specific application field in mind, the strategies behind it can be easily generalized to other sectors, also outside the field of Education.