Computers & Education 48 (2007) 567–581 www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu 0360-1315/$ - see front matter  2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2005.03.007 Performing a course material enhancement process with asynchronous interactive online system Hei-Chia Wang ¤ Institute of Information Management, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan Received 15 September 2004; accepted 28 March 2005 Abstract Online systems have come to be heavily used in education, particularly for online learning and collecting information not otherwise readily available. Most e-learning systems, including interactive learning systems, have been designed to “push” course materials to students but rarely to “collect” or “pull” ideas from them. The interactive mechanisms in proposed instructional design models, however, prevent many potential designers from improving course quality, even though some believe that the learning experience and the comments of students are important for enhancing course materials. As well, students could actually con- tribute to instructional design. This paper presents a course material enhancement process that elicits ideas from students by encouraging students to modify course materials. This process had been tested on di Verent higher education programs, both graduate and undergraduate. It aims to understand which programs’ students have a higher willingness to par- ticipate in this work and if they can beneWt from this process. To facilitate this research, an asynchronous inter- action system, teacher digital assistant (TDA), was designed for teachers to receive responses, recommendations, and modi Wed materials from students at any time. The major advantage of this process is that it could embed students’ thoughts into the course material to improve the curriculum, which can beneWt future students.  2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Teacher digital assistant; Course material enhancement; Asynchronous interaction; Improving classroom teaching; Interactive learning environments ¤ Tel.: +886 6 275757553724; fax: +886 6 2362162. E-mail address: hcwang@mail.ncku.edu.tw.