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The research for this thesis involves a case study about the development of a Web-based Curriculum (WBC) in the Institute of Vocational Education of Hong Kong (IVE), abased on a WBC Change Model which provides a research framework emphasizing the importance of managing change in relation to the flexibility and interactivity in the context of the WBC. Previous research studies on Web-based education about its effectiveness on learning outcomes are found to be highly controversial. There is an assertion that the failure to fully use technology in education may be due to academic and technical divide. With regard to this, the study gives a balanced consideration to both educational and technological issues. It shows how the flexibility provided by the addition of WBC contributes to student learning and serves the new needs in the IVE. It also explains how strict control can stifle the growth of the WBC. It is found that human interactions and interactive elements of the WBC are likely to improve student performance as compared with non-human and static elements respectively. The study explores the highly complicated effects of different types of virtual interaction on student learning. The overall effect can be zero or destructive if one or more components dominate the others. If this is the case, the theory of `no-significant difference' prevails but eventually fails to reflect the true picture. The thesis provides further evidence to support the theory of additional learning benefits for different types of interaction on the Web. This research uniquely addresses the distinct characteristics of language barriers for the native Chinese students in Hong Kong especially when the Internet is primarily designed for native English users. Finally, the study explains why and how the failure of the WBC in IVE is related to the curriculum and academic structure. It depicts the conditions to support the development of a unified WBC and illustrates why the educational institutions are slow to respond to technological change. It also identifies those critical success factors related to technology and explains why a mixed strategy on information technology (IT) is suitable for effective implementation of the WBC. The results of this study have significant and far-reaching effects on the formulation of academic policy, organization structure and IT strategy especially for higher and tertiary institutions in Hong Kong.

Adult education programmes in East Africa have historically combined literacy training with a range of efforts to shape the way African women expressed their femininity and sexuality. Early missionaries believed that literacy together with Victorian ideals of feminine propriety, housewifery and mothering would engender 'civilisation' in African women. Today, assisting women to undergo a process of self-realisation is more likely an aim of literacy programmes and reported impacts are more readily attributed to the use of participatory methods than to literacy learning. My first aim is to show that participatory approaches to adult learning are vulnerable to prescriptive manipUlations in the way conventional literacy programmes have long been. This ethnographic study focuses on two NGO literacy programmes in Uganda, one urban, one rural; to explore how women learners construct knowledge during the learning process; how they and others around them perceive this effort and its outcomes, and how this tallies with the expectations development practitioners invest in adult education. Women's ambitions are analysed both with regard to those themes of study that have been popular since colonial times (i.e. health and hygiene) and with regard to more recent concerns for women's empowerment (gender equality in the domestic and public domain). Regardless of their own intentions, programme makers are found to exercise only limited influence over the outcomes of literacy programmes. My second objective is then to illustrate how women learners and facilitators selectively interpret and internalise learning themes and use the messages received or construed to advance their own position in their social contexts. To this end women may prize externally visible health and hygiene practices as symbols of their own conversion to modem ways of living, showing less interest in benefits to physical well-being that may ensue. The desire to be recognised as a 'proper' woman also takes priority over attempts to overtly challenge prevailing norms of gender relations, not because of women's conservatism, but on the contrary, because gender relations already are subject to much overt and covert tension outside of the classes. In conclusion, the aspirations women develop from within their cultural context are seen to mould literacy programmes and their outcomes more significantly than the degree to which participatory methods are followed.

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