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The suggested learning outcomes provide the basis for wider discussion, for possible inclusion in curricula both at undergraduate and continuing education levels, and as the basis for the development of new educational materials.

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are Senior Programme Officers at BECTAThe criteria presented here were originally developed to enable evaluation of cancer web sites for the general public. Subsequently, the criteria were developed and refined in a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency. These were used to support focus groups evaluating the prototype Virtual Teacher's Centre on the National Grid for Learning.The question of how to evaluate Web sites is being vigorously debated in medical publications and needs greater debate in educational forums. Many such discussions (Impicciatore et al., 1997) tend to deal with evaluation of content. Guidelines have been developed which address issues of provenance, reliability, coverage and attribution, and have been derived by adapting and applying guidelines for academic publications. The Vancouver group guidelines adopted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, 1997) is one such example. The British Healthcare Internet Association has developed a similar set of standards (BHIA, 1996).At the same time criteria for evaluation of screen design, structure and functionality of Web texts have been developed by teams with a background in evaluation of multimedia (for example, Alexander and Tatekinds of criteria must be considered alongside those associated with content. McLuhan's phrase, "The medium is the massage", is in fact more apposite in its original form (McLuhan, 1968) than in the often misquoted version. However, whether dealing with content, design or both, existing criteria still do not sufficiently address fitness of form for purpose and audience and few address usage or evaluation.Our purpose is to develop a tool that can be used both by developers and users. Such a tool needs to be tested and the principles it embodies debated. It is therefore as work in progress that we offer the criteria below. Please use them and let us know how they can be improved. The authors can be contacted at the email addresses given.

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