Highly Interactive Web-Based Courseware

Zukünftige Lehr-/Lernprogramme sollen als vernetzte Systeme die Lernenden befähigen, Lerninhalte zu erforschen und zu konstruieren, sowie Verständnisschwierigkeiten und Gedanken in der Lehr-/Lerngemeinschaft zu kommunizieren. Lehrmaterial soll dabei in digitale Lernobjekte übergeführt, kollaborativ von Programmierern, Pädagogen und Designern entwickelt und in einer Datenbank archiviert werden, um von Lehrern und Lernenden eingesetzt, angepasst und weiterentwickelt zu werden. Den ersten Schritt in diese Richtung machte die Lerntechnologie, indem sie Wiederverwendbarkeit und Kompabilität für hypermediale Kurse spezifizierte. Ein größeres Maß an Interaktivität wird bisher allerdings noch nicht in Betracht gezogen. Jedes interaktive Lernobjekt wird als autonome Hypermedia-Einheit angesehen, aufwändig in der Erstellung, und weder mehrstufig verschränk- noch anpassbar, oder gar adäquat spezifizierbar. Dynamische Eigenschaften, Aussehen und Verhalten sind fest vorgegeben. Die vorgestellte Arbeit konzipiert und realisiert Lerntechnologie für hypermediale Kurse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung hochgradig interaktiver Lernobjekte. Innovativ ist dabei zunächst die mehrstufige, komponenten-basierte Technologie, die verschiedenste strukturelle Abstufungen von kompletten Lernobjekten und Werkzeugsätzen bis hin zu Basiskomponenten und Skripten, einzelnen Programmanweisungen, erlaubt. Zweitens erweitert die vorgeschlagene Methodik Kollaboration und individuelle Anpassung seitens der Teilnehmer eines hypermedialen Kurses auf die Software-Ebene. Komponenten werden zu verknüpfbaren Hypermedia-Objekten, die in der Kursdatenbank verwaltet und von allen Kursteilnehmern bewertet, mit Anmerkungen versehen und modifiziert werden. Neben einer detaillierten Beschreibung der Lerntechnologie und Entwurfsmuster für interaktive Lernobjekte sowie verwandte hypermediale Kurse wird der Begriff der Interaktivität verdeutlicht, indem eine kombinierte technologische und symbolische Definition von Interaktionsgraden vorgestellt und daraus ein visuelles Skriptschema abgeleitet wird, welches Funktionalität übertragbar macht. Weiterhin wird die Evolution von Hypermedia und Lehr-/Lernprogrammen besprochen, um wesentliche Techniken für interaktive, hypermediale Kurse auszuwählen. Die vorgeschlagene Architektur unterstützt mehrsprachige, alternative Inhalte, bietet konsistente Referenzen und ist leicht zu pflegen, und besitzt selbst für interaktive Inhalte Online-Assistenten. Der Einsatz hochgradiger Interaktivität in Lehr-/Lernprogrammen wird mit hypermedialen Kursen im Bereich der Computergraphik illustriert.The grand vision of educational software is that of a networked system enabling the learner to explore, discover, and construct subject matters and communicate problems and ideas with other community members. Educational material is transformed into reusable learning objects, created collaboratively by developers, educators, and designers, preserved in a digital library, and utilized, adapted, and evolved by educators and learners. Recent advances in learning technology specified reusability and interoperability in Web-based courseware. However, great interactivity is not yet considered. Each interactive learning object represents an autonomous hypermedia entity, laborious to create, impossible to interlink and to adapt in a graduated manner, and hard to specify. Dynamic attributes, the look and feel, and functionality are predefined. This work designs and realizes learning technology for Web-based courseware with special regard to highly interactive learning objects. The innovative aspect initially lies in the multi-level, component-based technology providing a graduated structuring. Components range from complex learning objects to toolkits to primitive components and scripts. Secondly, the proposed methodologies extend community support in Web-based courseware – collaboration and personalization – to the software layer. Components become linkable hypermedia objects and part of the courseware repository, rated, annotated, and modified by all community members. In addition to a detailed description of technology and design patterns for interactive learning objects and matching Web-based courseware, the thesis clarifies the denotation of interactivity in educational software formulating combined levels of technological and symbolical interactivity, and deduces a visual scripting metaphor for transporting functionality. Further, it reviews the evolution of hypermedia and educational software to extract substantial techniques for interactive Web-based courseware. The proposed framework supports multilingual, alternative content, provides link consistency and easy maintenance, and includes state-driven online wizards also for interactive content. The impact of great interactivity in educational software is illustrated with courseware in the Computer Graphics domain

Courseware in academic library user education: a literature review from the GAELS Joint Electronic Library project

The use of courseware for information skills teaching in academic libraries has been growing for a number of years. The GAELS project was required to create a set of learning materials to support Joint Electronic Library activity at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities and conducted a literature review of the subject. This review discovered a range of factors common to successful library courseware implementations, such as the need for practitioners to feel a sense of ownership of the medium, a need for courseware customization to local information environments, and an emphasis on training packages for large bodies of undergraduates. However, we also noted underdeveloped aspects worthy of further attention, such as treatment of pedagogic issues in library CAL implementations and use of hypertextual learning materials for more advanced information skills training. We suggest ways of improving library teaching practice and further areas of research

Courseware in academic library user education: A literature review from the GAELS Joint Electronic Library Project

The use of courseware for information skills teaching in academic libraries has been growing for a number of years. In order to create effective courseware packages to support joint electronic library activity at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, the GAELS project conducted a literature review of the subject. This review discovered a range of factors common to successful library courseware implementations, such as the need for practitioners to feel a sense of ownership of the medium, a need for courseware customization to local information environments, and an emphasis on training packages for large bodies of undergraduates. However, we also noted underdeveloped aspects worthy of further attention, such as treatment of pedagogic issues in library computer‐aided learning (CAL) implementations and use of hypertextual learning materials for more advanced information skills training. We describe how these findings shaped the packages produced by the project and suggest ways forward for similar types of implementation

Using assignment data to analyse a blended information literacy intervention: a quantitative approach

This research sought to determine whether a blended information literacy learning and teaching intervention could statistically significantly enhance undergraduates’ information discernment compared to standard face-to-face delivery. A mixture of face-to-face and online activities, including online social media learning, was used. Three interventions were designed to develop the information literacies of first-year undergraduates studying Sport and Exercise at Staffordshire University and focused on one aspect of information literacy: the ability to evaluate source material effectively. An analysis was devised where written evaluations of found information for an assessment were converted into numerical scores and then measured statistically. This helped to evaluate the efficacy of the interventions and provided data for further analysis. An insight into how the information literacy pedagogical intervention and the cognitive processes involved in enabling participants to interact critically with information is provided. The intervention which incorporated social media learning proved to be the most successful learning and teaching approach. The data indicated that undergraduate students’ information literacy can be developed. However, additional long-term data is required to establish whether this intervention would have a lasting impact

E-Learning in Business

e-Learning is replacing face-to-face classroom instruction in a growing number of businesses, but what is the prospect for the continued proliferation of e-learning in business? On one hand, the quality of instruction, the cost effectiveness of new technology, a supportive e-learning educational culture, an expansion of the Internet, an increase in online courses, shorter business cycles, mergers, and increasing competition encourage business use of e-learning. On the other hand, employee reticence in using learning technologies, insufficient corporate investment, lack of business-relevant university courses, narrow bandwidth, and Internet access issues are constricting the business use of these technologies

Semantic web technology for web-based teaching and learning: A roadmap

The World-Wide Web has become the predominant platform for computer-aided instruction. Contentorientation, access and interactive features have made the Web a successful technology. The Web, however, is still evolving. We expect in particular Semantic Web technology to substantially impact Web-based teaching and learning. In this paper, we examine the potential of this technology and how we expect it to influence content representation and the work of the instructor and the learner

FORGE enabling FIRE facilities for the eLearning community

International audienceMany engineering students at third-level institutions across the world will not have the advantage of using real-world experimentation equipment, as the infrastructure and resources required for this activity are too expensive. This paper explains how the FORGE (Forging Online Education through FIRE) FP7 project transforms Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) testbed facilities into educational resources for the eLearning community. This is achieved by providing a framework for remote experimentation that supports easy access and control to testbed infrastructure for students and educators. Moreover, we identify a list of recommendations to support development of eLearning courses that access these facilities and highlight some of the challenges encountered by FORGE

Reviews

Brian Clegg, Mining The Internet — Information Gathering and Research on the Net, Kogan Page: London, 1999. ISBN: 0–7494–3025–7. Paperback, 147 pages, £9.99