MEDIT, a World Wide Web-based environment, aims at offering complementary support to traditional educational practices. The MEDIT approach distinguishes a set of virtual working spaces and provides the appropriate services for each of them. In addition to a generic hypermedia authoring system, designers implemented advanced tools for multiple view representation of a course and creation and maintenance of private workspaces, in order to stimulate information exchange, interaction, and collaborative work among users. The project, which is currently under evaluation through three undergraduate courses in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is described in this paper. The first section highlights the development of a multidisciplinary Web-based environment, including pedagogical issues in distance education, usability issues of human computer interaction, and technical issues of developing and producing large hypermedia authoring systems. The next section discusses in detail the features of automatic creation of a virtual course space and one of the important pedagogical issues addressed in the MEDIT system--the course customization and views. The final section discusses implications of the distance education implemented and plans for future work. Four figures present screens of the course spaces, the semantic view in tree format, interface to access the semantic view, and private workspace creation. (Contains 11 references.) (Author/AEF)