Team teaching is not a new concept, but with a virtual environment, the possibilities of expanding course material can become flexible and diverse. One model involves educational space that resembles an atelier, a design studio, or an architectural office rather than a traditional classroom. It may consist of the following components:

• Three or four different instructors representing three or four different course areas, or sections of one course.
• Classes consist of 80-100 students, with each instructor having responsibility for 20-25 students.
• Small groups pursue long-term projects.
• Groups can be spread across several rooms.
• Everyone moves back and forth between synchronous and asynchronous interactions.
• Research takes place by several means:
• face-to-face responses
• computer consultations
• e-mail queries
• answers given in subgroups or group reports

Flexible use of space and time allows more meaningful learning to take place in a cooperative manner. Participants can pursue different aspects of problem solving then coordinate their accomplishments in a common achievement that exceeds what each would manage alone. Electronic management of learning materials solves the problem of limited resources to be shared among many students by:

• Allowing students to search for information in many directions at once.
• Providing an extensive array of resources.
• Encouraging considerable depth of information.

Traditional teaching and learning was based on a sequential curriculum largely a function of print materials (the number of books available for a given number of students, for example) rather than on any psychological necessity of learning discrete subjects in a particular order. Networking and the availability of the World Wide Web allows learning to take place in a continuous envelopment following many paths:

• in a cumulative way
• moving forward and backwards to pick up information that might have been missed previously
• without repeating a whole class

The use of multimedia systems allows human expression to be expressed in one complex system rather than in one that is strictly verbal. Some results of this process may be:

• reshaping cultural politics of the curriculum
• curriculum resists traditional exclusionist position of minority groups
• instructors facilitate the material a student selects rather than prescribing material
• experiential learning takes place rather than formal learning
• the project method takes precedence