Abstract Educational institutions are employing a variety of processes to support Web‐based courses. In our efforts to help faculty mount such courses, we found it helpful to divide course material into knowledge‐based versus skill‐based elements, and to develop activities that capitalize on the unique environment of the Web. In this article, we discuss our successes and failures, and cover some legal issues we discovered that affect how we use both preexisting and student‐produced materials.

The workplace is becoming increasingly diverse in ways that are changing our understanding of who our readers are and how we can make effective communication choices to bridge the gaps between us. Communication problems arise because of differences in world experience, in the amount of common knowledge shared within cultures, in the structure of societies and the workplace, in culturally specific rhetorical strategies, and even in differences in processing graphics. Most textbooks provide little information on these topics, so the technical writing teacher needs to find ways to incorporate issues of international and multicultural communication into the classroom.