This paper describes the design of a workstation-based environment that provides facilities for the management of instructional materials at the post-secondary level. The facilities include:

• a graphical user interface, providing convenient access to instructional tools and data• simplified access to multi-media facilities and resources available through external communications networks

• a means to customize system-supplied tools and to build interfaces to new tools• integration with an object-oriented software development environment, providing uniform access to instructional applications written in standard applications languages

For the purposes of this paper, a" workstation" is defined simply as any machine capable of running the MIT X Windows system [Schiefier 86], which implies network access capabilities. X Windows is currently being adopted as a standard by a large number of hardware and software vendors, including DEC, Sun, IBM, and Apple. Significantly, the X Windows system is being targeted for a number of relatively inexpensive personal computers. Hence, a workstation need not be thought of as a expensive device out of reach of many instructional institutions. With the decreasing hardware costs, and the development of industry-wide standards such as X Windows, the workstation-based environment is now well within the reach of academic computing budgets.