Does Link Rot Harm Distance Education Programs
from the what-a-pain dept
Some distance learning professors have done some research on link rot. Link rot, of course, is what happens when URLs you link to go away - whether the site is taken down, the URLs are changed, or the server is dead. For distance learning, though, they say it can be quite the pain. They set up all these courses with links to relevant topics, only to find them disappear. Of course, the article also quotes another distance learning expert who waves off all this concern saying that most of the people who do distance learning are sophisticated enough to "know how to react" to a broken link. I'm not sure what he means by "know how to react" - but for me, it would mean checking out the Google cache or the web archive.
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