PEOI believes that continuous development of course material is of primary importance for both faculty and students to make courses interesting, challenging, authoritative and useful, and for both faculty and students to stay abreast of their professional field and engage in life-long personal growth.

What should a completed course on PEOI contain? While the answer naturally varies considerably depending on the subject and discipline, it is believed that a course on PEOI should offer a learning experience equivalent to that of a semester in an average university course in a classroom, which covers usually fifteen weeks of instruction, or as close to that as possible. In some cases, because PEOI courses can link to a wealth of material on the Internet, the volume of readings can actually be greater that a class lectured course.

At the very least a completed course should have
- a full text as complete as a textbook;
- examples, cases, exercise, summaries, review questions, readings, lab work, projects and the like to accommodate different learning styles;
- knowledge assessment with assignments, tests at the end of each chapter, and a comprehensive project or examination at the end of the course.

The procedures available on PEOI are specifically designed to make it convenient for course material to be easily updated and expanded by faculty members. As will be apparent in the following paragraphs, faculty knowledge of HTML is minimal. All faculty teaching a particular subject can act as author and make changes in course files. All changes to a course page are initially saved in a temporary file. Only after 1) the author has click on "Notify work completed", and 2) the project coordinator (i.e. moderator) has verified the temporary changes are justified, is the course page moved to its permanent location.

Changes to course pages can be performed in at least three different methods:
1- minor corrections in spelling, punctuation or grammar can be done directly in the course page; likewise, any additional examples or citations that do not affect the conceptual logic of the page;
2- changes that are more significant should best be place in the separate section designated as "Comments" present (or easily inserted) in any course chapter, so that other authors can review the proposed modification of a course page before it is pasted in; 3- concept changes should best be first discussed with co-authors and project coordinator by exchange of email messages.

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