The paper presents aspects related to the process of creation of
a hypermedia educational module. A hypermedia educational module
is used over an WWW "shell" and integrates a hypermedia book
enriched with programmable objects, on-line testing,
evaluation and recording of student performance in a database. It
also adds syncron communication facilities for interaction among
the students and with the instructor. Hypermedia educational modules open
the door to a new generation of powerful educational tools and associated
methodologies.
Chances for further improvements are increased by the fact that the
technology
(Java, WWW, servers, browsers, JavaScript, HTML is free and available and
the usability of the Web is continuously improved.
Keywords: education, hypermedia, programmable objects, virtual laboratory, on-line testing and evaluation, syncron communication.
Introduction
Technology has made dramatic changes in education, culture,
communications
and trade. As a result finding, manipulating, transmitting consuming
information
in digital form has become a critical function of the human society and
has strongly influenced the social relations.
Education reform in developed countries, based on new paradigms (virtual
labs, distance learning, digital libraries, media centers), experiments
new organizing structures, new management, and new ways to use technology
[3].
Education through Internet is now accredited to have a massive impact upon
all types of formal and non-formal education in the near future on the
background of a rapid expansion of the Web accompanied by a dramatic
increase
in available network bandwidth.
Among different reasons to consider technology not only as a curriculum,
but as new learning environment, suitable for technical as well as
non-technical
fields of education is that learning in a virtual environment should
precede
working in such an environment.
The impact of Virtual Universities supports the idea of the social
acceptance
of an entire educational environment build around the communication
technology.
If the first step in assimilating a new technology is adapting it to the
old habits, the next one normally is creating new ways to foster education
[5].
The hypermedia educational module is a virtual learning and
exploration
environment. It integrates a hypermedia book enriched with
programmable
objects, on-line testing, evaluation and recording of student
performance in a database. It also adds syncron
communication
facilities for interaction among students and/or instructor [9].
This environment allows students to explore the learning material
organized
as a hypermedia on-line book, to conduct experiments in a virtual digital
lab, to interact synchronously with colleagues and/or instructor and to
evaluate their assessment through interactive tests.
We are not aware of Hypermedia Educational Modules, in the sense
introduced
here, being developed without proprietary technology and made freely
available.
This paper reviews the pro and con arguments to develop such modules and
presents the characteristics of such a module.
The Hypermedia Educational Module (HEM) "Fundamentals of
Computer Science", was developed with founding and support
provided
by the ROCOCO (Developing and Restructuring of Short - cycle Higher
Education
for ROmanian COmputer science & engineering COlleges) Project,
Activity
A1: Review of curriculum and development of
courses and related teaching materials for CS&E.
The idea of HEMs has stirred different reactions among educators. We reviewed the ones we considered the most significant.
The Pros
HEMs offer a richer learning experience through "programmable objects". Java applets [6], developed just for educational purposes, allow learner to interact with visual objects embedded in HTML pages. As the code is platform independent, the applets can be downloaded over the Internet and run in the browser window on the clients' machines.
The learners' demand to be technologically challenged. This observation is also valid for all subjects taught in schools. The students now in schools have a far richer technological experience than previous generations and definitely a new way of learning, more based on their new way to interact with information. The technical appliances available at home - computers, VCRs, video cameras, programmable appliances - offer them a greater variety of interactions in learning than most schools.
Decrease in education price. This should be taken into consideration as the number of students increases while the governmental founds directed to education don't. The university could save on publishing as well as on hardware; many students will be happy to invest in such a versatile tool as a computer - the more so as their prices decrease - which leads to a better ratio computers per student and a decrease of the pressure related to lab access.
HEM has proved successful in teaching Computer Science and Computing Sciences While this is understandable as the best way of learning something is interacting with it, nothing stands against expanding this experience to other subjects like Physics, Chemistry or Engineering.
Continuous Education changes the student body structure; students are older and more aware of their educational options. There isn't much to comment on this as it is self explanatory. Educators can no longer ignore the new technological facilities.
Education through HEM is available around the clock being what is sometimes called "just in time education" Advantages for Continuous Education where students have different schedules and are spread across different regions is evident. Just in time education means here that it is available at student's convenience in terms of space and time.
HEMs are flexible and permit quick update. They allow
instructors to update the course at any given moment, allow "virtual
visiting lecturers". It means the instructor could take the best of
a lecture and use it for further reference.
It has been observed by others [8] that courseware must not be all
encompassing,
and therefore must not be developed all at once. More, it must not be of
the same quality as say a televised lecture as "a traditional lecture
does not attempt to cover all that must be known about a particular
topic".
Rather it acts as a road map conveying an opinion, a perspective on a
subject.
New technical facilities. It was about time, after adapting the technology to old habits, to find new ways to use it more effectively; there's a visible pressure and demand for a more significant contribution of technology in education and for an effective pedagogy and methodology to implement it in the classroom.
New free technical opportunities (not proprietary): Java, JavaScript, HTML, Web servers and browsers are free and easy expandable. What is more important, Java is platform independent which makes HEMs accessible regardless the machine type connecting to the server.
New technical possibilities to give the collaborative dimension [4] to Distance Education. It has been observed that classical Distance Education tends to leave the student isolated [1]. Java networking facilities permit Java communication applets to run within Web pages providing HEMs the communication dimension.
One last observation is that hypermedia courseware could be easily enriched by students' comments.
The cons
There was neither the time nor the expertise available to construct a consistent theory-addressing HEM. The possibility to construct an entire virtual educational environment (VEE) around the communication technology has been poorly addressed in a systematic manner [5].
Immaturity of Web technology: HTML is not a programming
language.
It is a document descriptive serial language with serious limitation
regarding
the description of mathematical formulae and page layout. It also offers
limited interactivity by "intrinsec" controls therefore the user
interface one could construct using only HTML looks and works very
primitive.
There are several ways to overcome these problems[7]: CGI (Common Gateway
Interface), VB Script, ActiveX, JavaScript and Java. There is also the
evolution of HTML (see specification for HTML 3.2)
CGI is slow, its interactivity relies entirely on the server side and
therefore
requires a lot of traffic.
VBScript and ActiveX are proprietary and their development is out of
control.
JavaScript and Java are free. Java is platform independent and could be
used both on the server and on the browser side.
Limited "group learning" It relates to the still limited possibilities offered by communication applets and underdeveloped "shared workplace" like a white board, syncron interactivity in virtual laboratories and the like.
Lack of an effective methodology on how to use them effectively; we are not aware of systematic pedagogical studies related to effectiveness of learning in virtual environments.
Lack of simple, integrated authoring tools; creating such an educational module still requires expertise in several different fields.
Security issues are not addressed or, at the best, are treated in a patchwork manner.
Adequate software remains a fundamental difficulty, arrising from an inadequate conceptual model. The computer science community is trying to "stretch an existing paradigm...into a regime for which it was not designed" [13]. The result is a collection of partial sollutions generally lacking coherence and scalability.
Our experience in HEMs
Most of the students1 attending our university in the first
year have a solid background in mathematics and physics but almost no
experience
at all regarding information technology and the use of computers. An
efficient
approach to this problem, considering the students enrolled in short term
education (college) is an attempt to offer them an as complete as possible
picture of this field in a short course taught in the first semester. It
had to be both a "Computer Survival" and a "Fundamentals
of Computer Science". Using the fundamental courses in computer
architecture,
organization, operating systems, networking and the like, would mean to
"hit" the students with about 2000 to 3000 of highly technical
material, hardly to be considered an effective approach. Bridging the
material
was not enough. We considered then a HEM. To replay the main ideas of the
introduction, a HEM integrates a hypermedia book embedded
with programmable objects, on-line testing, and syncron
communication.
Here are the rules we followed in the process:
The hypermedia book
The first thing we considered was the usability of the module as the
level of usability (messured throgh two variables: effectiveness and time)
affects the learning performace [11]. As most of the students using
our module for the first time have limited or no background at all in
Information
Technology, the support we provided had to rely entirely on learners'
previous
experience, through the use of metaphors. As metaphors are derived from
a source domain where the user has previous experience, the one which
seems
appropiate is "the book".
Along with the "static" aspects of the book metaphor (like
organization,
structure, secvential reading, use of graphics, etc) we added some
"dynamic"
characteristics like internal/external links, interactive Java applets
and interactive tests, verified on the client side.
The hypermedia book we considered is the interface and the
content.
Fig. 1 Graphical representation of the system.
The hypermedia book is considered here as collections of
inter-connected
documents and programs, all of which are related to a common theme. The
book was developed under the following rules:
Advantages:
One observation seems to be important. We divided the links into internal and external (not in the HTML sense regarding URLs) The book metaphor is related to internal links; the learner never leaves the book. Whenever a link leaves the book it happens in a separate window.
Programmable objects
By programmable objects we understand both small applications (e.g.
Java applets) and standalone applications (e.g. Digital Simulator)
integrated
in the module. The Digital Laboratory has been developed by third parties
but has been fully integrated in the educational environment to support
experiments for several assignments.
They facilitate:
The way Java applets work within the context of Web servers and
browsers
makes them an excellent way to deliver interactive graphical applications
over the web.
A plus:
Syncron communication
The module provides syncron (chat) and asyncron (mail) communication
with instructor and among the students. Two Java Applets, a server and
a client solve the syncron communication. The first is running on the
machine
hosting the module and the second on the students' machines.
Communication is available all the time provided the server is up and
running.
All the communication can be registered and saved for future references.
This can be a good starting point for further improvements of the
courseware.
Interactive forms
The interactive forms are used both for self assesment and for
recording
students performance on a weekly basis. They are organised like a multiple
choice test which makes use of JavaScript for local evaluation. A Java
applet displays the performance and the time required and sends the
information
in the database.
Netscape Navigator 3.0 and later allows JavaScript applications to work
and interact with Java applets and heps designers to meet some exam like
criteria (e.g. identification, time limits, performace record) [14].
Virtual Laboratory
The virtual laboratory we used has been developed by third parties [15] an could be used only for simulations related to Chapter 2 (Digital Circuits). It comes with 18 "ready to use" experimental settings and allows a large number of new experiments to be simulated.
The Data Base
The database is accessed from the server-side scripting environment and from inside the programmable objects. The connection is made using a standard ODBC protocol, JDBC and the JDBC-ODBC Bridge. The database component is used for:
The User Interface
The interface guides the student through the educational path. The
students
have to deal with two learning processes: how to interact with the system
and how to aquire new concepts. It should be noted that they are not
independent
[11] and they are carried out at the same time and use the same cognitive
resources.
We followed the "design practice" path and shaped most of the
students' activity through the on-line book which was considered both the
content and the interface [1]. The interface combines the
"engineering"
and the "user task" models [2].
The book space is devided into two frames, one containing the Contents
of the book and the tools and the other the hypertext and the applets.
Navigation within the book is very similar to navigation in any book. A
bonus is that instead of plain graphics students can interact with
circuits
and/or other small applications to learn how they work.
Another bonus is that links are organized in a helpful pattern inside the
book: Anexes, Glossary, Index, Contents, etc.
The necesary tools are visible and accesible all the time. Most of them
have their own user interface (like the Virtual Lab and the Plotter).
The interface has been evaluated without users, using heuristic methods
[12].
Conclusions:
HEMs based on free (not proprietary) technology, platform independent,
offer a solution to effective education in virtual environments.
The HEM we developed follows three paradigms:
The navigation paradigm:
The learning paradigm:
The teaching paradigm:
The Hypermedia Educational Module is available for hands-on testing at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dumitru/
References
Footnotes
1. Petru Maior University of Targu Mures
D. Radoiu, E. Rotariu, C.Enachescu Dept. of Computer Science, Petru Maior University, str. Nicolae Iorga nr.1, Tg. Mures 4300, Romania