Use of a Web Browser for Developing Investigative Skills

Russell Pennell, BSc, BE(Hons), MEngSci, GDipIS, Coordinator, Centre for Interactive Multimedia in Teaching, UWS Nepean, PO Box 10, Kingswood, NSW 2747 Phone: 61 2 678 7605 Fax: 61 2 678 7600. Email: r.pennell@nepean.uws.edu.au Home Page: CIMIT [HREF1]

Dr Elizabeth Margaret Deane, BSc(Hons), PhD, MABS, MHGS, MGSA, Associate Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, UWS Nepean, PO Box 10, Kingswood, NSW 2747 Phone: 61 2 685 9532 Fax: 61 2 685 9525. Email: e.deane@nepean.uws.edu.au Home Page: Science and Technology [HREF2 ]
Keywords: hypermedia, laboratory, HTML, immunology

The Project

Student Empowerment: A Problem Solving Approach to the Development of Research and Laboratory Competencies

Leader: Dr Elizabeth Margaret Deane. Partner: Dr Margaret Seto-Poon

The original objective of this project was to develop a series of graded problems which, for their solution, would require students to develop a series of experimental protocols. These experiments would then be implemented in the laboratory. The basic aim of this process is to instil in students an understanding, and hence ownership, of their experimental undertakings.

Easier said than done!

The Course

The Bachelor of Applied Science (Biological Sciences) program offered at UWS Nepean is structured to provide students with knowledge and competencies in basic sciences, such as Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Computing in the first 18 months of the course. In the subsequent 18 months, students focus on areas of Biochemistry, Microbiology, Immunology and Cell Biology. All these subjects consist of lectures covering theoretical material reinforced with carefully designed and tested laboratory activities. However, introduction to the research literature and its use is canvassed in more advanced subjects with students undertaking a major research project in their final semester.

Such a course structure is designed to give students a good theoretical and practical grounding and to stimulate enquiry. The current project supports this programme, developing the students' interest in and capacity to acquire knowledge.
There are currently approximately 40 students in the second and third year groups who will use this material. If dissemination occurs to other tertiary institutions in Australia, over a thousand students could make use of the Immunology version of the project.

The Rationale

Easier said than done! (continued...)
A review of the literature on problem solving indicated that for effective solution, problems need to be structured to allow (a) conceptualisation of the problem; and (b) relationship to key knowledge domains. Although considerable research has apparently been done on the processes involved in problem solving, little of it is particularly helpful in designing problems with a laboratory solution in mind.

One group (Stevens et al 1991 a and b, 1992) came close, in that they had developed a series of case studies to develop competencies in diagnosis in Clinical Immunology. They then set about evaluating the problem solving process by using search path mapping.

The standard approach to problem solving has involved a practise-based model where students are presented with a problem and its solution. Students then develop their own skills in the light of this model answer. This process is quite understandable in mathematics and physics but defied transposition to this project.

The final step in the evolution of our ideas was to revisit what we expected from this project. The problems we needed to devise were concerned with developing the students' ability to think, plan, access information and evaluate laboratory protocols in the light of desired outcomes. Therefore problems would need to be directed and initially patterned on a simple directive such as: Design an experimental protocol to investigate ...etc. Initial problems would be capable of solution through access to straight forward analytical protocols whilst higher order problems would require the marriage of a range of protocols and access to the research literature.

Having decided on this approach to the problems, it was now necessary to present the problems in a context which gave support to the learning process. This is where the hard work began!

To explore possible options in the solution of the problem (without costly laboratory based activities) it was decided to develop a database of laboratory procedures and their outcomes all related to the theoretical framework of immunology.

The arrangement of this support material makes use of the divisions used in the subject.
Non-specific defence, specific defence, disorders of immune function
Figure 1: Theoretical Divisions in the Subject

The computer program to be produced is but one component of a subject which seeks to develop the students' thinking and analytical skills. The subject is structured into three modules: Cells and Tissues; Soluble Components; Disorders. Students working in pairs are required to use a research paper in each of these areas during the semester. For each article they present a 15-20 minute discussion describing how it fits into the area of immunology, the rationale for the study, the experimental protocol chosen and its purpose, an explanation of the outcomes and, finally, a summary of what it all means.

Allied to this process students are required to write a major assignment, essentially a review article, in each of the thee major areas. They are to embed the research articles (gathered and read by all students) into the text as demonstrations of current research.

In semester 1 of 1995 the material which is the subject of the current computer project was used on paper. The problems were presented to the students at two levels. Working in pairs, students will use the resource base to develop a laboratory solution to two problems, one simple, one complex. Their solutions will be shown to the lecturer three weeks prior to the scheduled two-day extravaganza and discussed. Students will be required to organise appropriate equipment and laboratory consumables (within the boundaries of the protocols and others they may have accessed in the literature.

At the end of the two-day prac, each pair will give a fifteen-minute presentation of their problems and solutions which they will then write up as a paper.

In Semester 1 of 1994 and 1995 students used paper resources to carry out the procedures described above. In Semester 2 of 1994 the documentation of the resources was completed. The evaluations are presented in Figure 5. A number of prototype computer programs were prepared and evaluated. Expansion of the digital media resources to be used in the project is continuing.

The authoring tool used to arrange and present the material should permit cross-referencing and flexible access. Students will enter the program through the problems; they can then select on the screen to investigate any of the major areas displayed above. This process allows them to explore experimental procedures and their outcomes, as video clips and still photographs are incorporated into the text. The value of each experiment in investigating immune functioning can be clarified by cross-referencing to the text.

Delivery Issues

Any project involving the use of computers for learning must consider at its inception both the nature of the users and the mechanisms available for the delivery of the resulting work to them. The pre-skills and motivation of the users may need to be addressed, the interface design must be appropriate to the users and the user computers must be sufficiently accessible and of sufficient power to enable the materials to be delivered adequately. Implementation and maintenance of the work must be within the capability of the personnel available.

When the project commenced it was intended for delivery to second and third year Biochemistry students at the Westmead North campus of UWS Nepean via standalone or networked Macintosh computers. The Macs generally available to these students are in a single room two floors above the wet lab and are networked using Appleshare over Ethernet. There are no programmers employed by the Biological Sciences Department. Although a number of programmers are employed at another campus by the relevant Faculty, Science and Technology, they do not have network access to the student computer lab. The lab software is installed and maintained by staff of the Computing and Communications Division who are situated on another campus approximately 1km away. Hence the user facility will be largely unsupervised and programmer assistance generally not available.


The Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT)

In June 1992 the Minister for Higher Education and Employment Services announced the establishment of the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT) to promote the development of good teaching practice in higher education.

CAUT aims to improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in higher education by supplementing the efforts now being made by Australian universities to restore teaching and learning to their central place in academic culture. The program of competitive awards is intended to lead to practical improvements in teaching by supporting outstanding innovation in teaching, learning and assessment, and by ensuring wide dissemination of project results.

This project was supported by a National Teaching Development grant in 1994.

Further details of National Teaching Development projects are obtainable from the CAUT archives at ANU [HREF3]

About CIMIT

CIMIT, the Centre for Interactive Multimedia in Teaching, was established in August 1993 to provide support to Nepean staff in their use of digital technologies in their teaching. CIMIT acts as a prompt to innovation, as a training and resource centre and as a development centre for interactive multimedia teaching and learning resources. CIMIT has supported the interest and commitment of staff by holding training sessions in various aspects of multimedia use, by encouraging the sharing of ideas and by directly assisting individual staff in their use of multimedia in teaching. CIMIT facilities and personnel have created the digital material used in this project and assembled the interactive product. For further details refer to

The Structure Required

In using the project materials the student is intended to feel ownership of the learning process, arising from responsibility for the conceptualisation, design and implementation of laboratory experimentation.

The material is organised to allow the solution of a graded series of problems, with theory, experiments and references organised as shown in the following diagram. The arrows describe the unfolding of the structure of the knowledge base as the user moves outward from the problems.
linked sections of knowledge base
Figure 2: From the Problems to the Knowledge Base

The various subsections of the knowledge base are hyperlinked within their own section, to the top level of the three major sections and to the problems and the glossary. The student is able to move rapidly back and forth between them. For clarity, only one of the three sections of the knowledge base has been expanded in this view and the links have been omitted.

The Knowledge Base

This includes text, images, sounds and digital video. The text includes current theory, descriptions of experiments and lists of relevant journal articles for reference to particular research areas. The sounds are pronunciations of terms described in the associated glossary. The images and digital video are used to show the results of experiments and to assist the explanations of the glossary.

The lists of journal articles will be updated with each year's use of the material, as current practice alters and new protocols are developed.

Hypertext

In self-directed learning, the degrees of freedom allowed can be so great as to result in user confusion. This is particularly true of hypertext systems. The lack of physical location cues as the user moves through the system can result in them becoming "lost in hyperspace" (Neilsen 1990). While some authors choose to assist the user to create a mental model of the information space, users are more motivated by their need for knowledge of the problem space (Stanton 1994). They tend to be very task-specific in their activity; the posing of a problem in fact provides the compass that continually directs their efforts. Further, if the author imposes structure on the material it provides a conceptual backbone that restricts movement but makes the material easier to learn.

In the current work the structure imposed is quite clear in the layout of the text and in the links the student is able to traverse. The focus of the work is the solution of the problems posed. Both of these tend to reduce the need for location maps and reduce user confusion.

Because only major links will be established by the author, the text should be searchable by the user to locate particular words or phrases without reading the entire text. The onscreen version of the documents is to be supported by a paper version. The digital version is intended to act as a reference source which can be rapidly interrogated by the user. The paper version is available for more careful study.


Authoring Tools

General Requirements

In choosing an authoring tool, consideration may be given to the specific delivery situation, to the specific project requirements, to the current expertise available and to the general ability of the tool to implement an instructional design. In addition, the ease with which the product can be maintained and modified must be considered from the beginning.

Computer Type and Configuration

1: Users
The immediate users of the project materials attend the Westmead North site of UWS Nepean. There are currently 26 second-year and 15 third-year students who will use the facility. These students use Macintosh-delivered learning support software in their course and completed a unit on Information Systems using personal computers in first year.

2: Delivery Flexibility
This project is CAUT-funded; CAUT requires the dissemination of information about the projects and products it funds, with the intention of promoting their adoption as widely in Australia as possible. It would therefore be preferable for the product to be available for at least Macintosh and MS-DOS machines.

Computer Location. In use it is expected that students will not need the immediate facilities of a Biochemistry laboratory, as they will be required to discuss their chosen protocols with a lecturer before using the lab, but they should have access to the reference materials on paper in order to ease reading and markup. Consequently the materials do not need to be located on a machine in a wet lab but can be used in a general-purpose computer lab or other location.

File Size. Neglecting the use of video segments, the disk space taken by the raw materials should not exceed three megabytes. Hence they can be delivered either on standalone machine or via a local area network.

In use outside Nepean we shall need to consider the transport of the files. The size of sound and image files will be not be too large to prohibit distribution separately on floppy disk, but special provisions may need to be taken if the authoring tool used produces a single integrated file. Given the extensive computer networking of universities, even such large files can easily be transported to any likely institutional user but there may be some restriction on their use in open learning.

Maintenance. There may need to be separate products for different platforms. As a variety of versions are produced during the life cycle of the project due to correction of errors and updating of references and current theory, the ease of conversion of the primary source to the alternative platform may be a critical issue.

The degree of programming skill required for such maintenance and conversion is also critical and is discussed in more detail below.

3: Implementation

Documentation. A brief simple description should be provided on paper with the course materials which will enable students to operate the system on whichever platform is available without further assistance.

Access. The work does not require individual access to a computer. Students are likely to benefit from working in small groups (up to three students) as long as the environment permits discussion.

Speed. A response time of less than three seconds is desired in any system presenting information to users under user control. For greater times the user's attention will wander, external distractions will interfere and the efficiency of learning will be reduced. In fact only highly motivated users will persevere if response times are long or vary erratically.

Multimedia. The material to be presented to the students is largely text, but also includes diagrams, tables, images such as cells and electrophoresis gels, together with sounds and some short video segments.

The student machine should therefore be capable of the clear reproduction of the human voice, preferably with the option of headphone use.

The student machine must be capable of at least 256-colour graphics and of decoding quarter-screen compressed images without delays that interfere with student concentration.

Specific Hardware Available

At Westmead North the students have access to general-purpose computer facilities on two platforms: The number of students is small enough for their needs to be met by either facility separately.

The DOS machines are currently inadequate for the project, needing the addition of sound cards as a minimum upgrade to approach the lower level MPC specification. Even with this addition, current experience in this lab suggests they would possibly prove too slow in processing and network access.

Hence the project could initially be produced purely for the Macintosh LAN, with a later well-developed version able to run under MS-DOS or Windows.


b. Hypermedia

The knowledge base is not designed to be a text for the course, to be read from page 1 to 200. It is a reference source. In order to determine a suitable experimental protocol to solve the current problem, the student is required to read widely in the knowledge base and to use the reference literature. This reference to a range of locations in the material will be facilitated by use of a computer.

It is intended that photographs and similar records of typical outcomes of the experiments described should be included in the knowledge base. Because of the esoteric terminology used in the subject, a glossary will be provided and should include pronunciation of each term described. Consequently the authoring tool should have the ability to link text to images and sounds. Later some advice may be provided to students re the conduct of each experiment. This may require the inclusion of short sections of video.


c. Text searching

It is not intended that students be spoon-fed the solutions to the problems posed. There will be no "hot" keywords in the problems that will lead them straight to the experimental solution. They will need to determine through their reading of the theory and references which experiments would be most informative for their current problem. Hence the product should allow the student to find occurrences of particular terms, beyond those links programmed by the author.

While an extensive cross-referenced index of the material could be prepared, this would need to be maintained as new documents are added to the references and the theory material and experiments modified by other lecturers and in other institutions.

Many authoring systems provide a text search facility which would eliminate this maintenance load on the supervisors of the system and, while facilitating the student's search for relevant ideas in the knowledge base, allow the student to gain some valuable experience in the use of electronic documents for research.


d. User Help System

After an initial introduction, it should not be necessary for students to have and use a printed manual in order to use the program.

It should be possible to create a limited user-help system which can be accessed at any time while using the program. This may be used to refresh the student's knowledge of the system's operation or to offer advice on the solution of the Immunology problems.


e. Instructional Design Requirements

In general, computer-based instructional systems revolve around the use of rapid contextual feedback. They present information, elicit a response from the student, judge that response in some way and inform the student of their performance, hopefully in a manner that permits improvement in performance. This model applies to a range of situations, varying from simple tutorials to aircraft simulators.

The information presentation requires control over the screen design, the placement of appropriate text and graphics and the elimination of unnecessary stimuli (Cooper 1990). The explicit student response to be accepted by the system may be the selection or movement of an object on the screen or the entering of a free text response. (The implicit response, of course, is the stuff of learning higher order skills.) The system must rapidly judge the response against a programmed standard or else rely on the student to carry out the judgement themselves. Corrective feedback should enable the student to learn from their errors and improve performance. Frequently the system will keep a record of student responses and may use this to decide the course of future actions or simply make it available for student or teacher viewing

How appropriate is this model to the current project and to the selection of authoring tools? Not very appropriate, as it happens, and this does have implications for the use of the common authoring tools. We are constructing what might be called a referencing system rather than a tutorial system.

While it might be possible to predetermine the most appropriate experimental protocol to solve each problem, this is not the current intention. Instead, the corrective feedback in this project will be provided by the academic staff supervising the student learning, who will assess the protocol selected by the student and discuss whether it is appropriate.

The computer system is rather being used to store the reference material (originally on a variety of media) in a digital form to allow rapid display and cross-referencing.

The authoring system must easily allow the display of text. It must allow the display of coloured images and the playing of recorded sounds and digitised video. Hypermedia links and navigational controls should be easily created. Movement between documents or within documents should be both rapid and easy for the student to select. The general interface requirements of consistent behaviour and lack of clutter must be achievable.


f. Markup

As students use the material they will wish to take some notes and perhaps to mark places in the material in order to return to it easily. As a number of students use the material it should allow separate markups for different students.


g. Maintenance of the Learning System

The ease of maintenance of the learning system is an important property usually dependent upon the authoring tool chosen. There are a number of recognised barriers to the long-term use of computer-based learning support materials and several of these grow from the difficulty involved in maintaining and modifying the courseware.

The Flight of the Innovator. Computer-based learning support materials have frequently been introduced into courses as a result of the efforts and vision of a particular individual, one who is comfortable with change and seeks new challenges in their professional work. Unfortunately these characteristics are not those required to embed the use of such materials in the professional teaching practices of the particular discipline or institution. In fact, these characteristics often lead the academic to a new institution after a few years, leaving the learning support materials orphaned and at the mercy of whichever academic "inherits" the course.

Currency. By the time the innovator leaves the institution, the course may have altered slightly, requiring that the computer-based material be updated to reflect current practice, terminology or other emphasis. The new course supervisor will assert a slightly different emphasis to the previous incumbent or the institution may introduce new requirements, reducing further the currency of the material.

Implementation by Other Institutions. The "Not Invented Here" syndrome is still active in academic institutions, with some reason. Every teacher takes a slightly different view of the approach to be used in teaching, and the idiosyncrasies which one imposes on the material are often anathema to another.

Local Differences. More substantially, drug names, technical terminology and professional opinions differ from one location to another. Academics are particularly resistant to compromise in such professional and discipline matters.

The Flexibility of Paper. Paper-based support materials are more easily changed in the institutional framework, despite their more concrete expression, because the skills required to cause such changes are more widespread.

The Problem of Programming. Computer programming is still a professional discipline that requires years of training and consistent application. The practitioners of such skills are thin on the ground in teaching institutions. While these professionals are in such short supply, courseware which requires their frequent attention is not likely to survive the difficulties posed above.

While end-user programming has become more common with the ubiquity of PC's, quality CBL projects are usually the work of a team which includes a professional programmer. Major modifications to the work may assume the characteristics of a conventional courseware development program, where the team members contribute cooperatively to the final design. The recognised subject matter learning curve each has to go through then becomes a major barrier to the work of a maintenance programmer in subsequent years.


Conclusion

Immunology is an active field. The product will fall into disuse if its knowledge base becomes dated and it is unable to be maintained and modified by the institution and staff supporting its use. The choice of authoring tool is critical in enabling such maintenance to be performed by available staff.


Possible Tools

The software tools that might be used to construct this work include The limitations of space restrict discussion of these alternatives, but a fuller discussion can be found at the CIMIT Home Page [HREF1]

Hypercard

Apple's Hypercard was once the most widely used software authoring tool for the Macintosh, being supplied free with each machine. It uses the metaphor of file-cards, accessed sequentially.

The Voyager Company produce an Expanded Book Toolkit based on Hypercard which provides an interface which mimics a book, adding rapid random access features and excellent searching tools. The screen below is from a prototype for the project, made using the Toolkit.

A page from an Expanded Book
Figure 3: A page from an Expanded Book

The design of the interface to imitate a book is appropriate, considering the many journal papers that must be used by students in this course.

The maintenance of software written in message-passing systems such as those mentioned above is made difficult because the scripts that control the operation of the interface can be scattered through a variety of objects and layers. Careful documentation of the structure and logic of the system can reduce this difficulty but if this is not available to later supervisors, the maintenance and modification of the courseware is less likely to occur.

Netscape: Interactive Multimedia "for the rest of us"?

Netscape, produced by Netscape Communications, is not an authoring tool but a media delivery interface. It processes text files which incorporate tags specifying how the text and other media should be displayed. The tags are Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and can be added to the text using any word processor.

The tags can specify the display of an external image or act as hypermedia buttons, causing the playing of a sound or digital video file, a jump to another place in the text file or the loading of a new document. The new document can be on the same machine or can reside on any computer accessible through a local or wide area network or through the Internet. Thus Netscape can be used for creating simple interactive multimedia, using just the files on the user's machine, or it can act as a client requesting files from a server many thousands of km away. If a server machine is used, sections of an image can be made sensitive to a mouse-click, (eg a map of Australia [HREF4]) so even more complex interactivity is possible.

Since versions of Netscape are available for Macintosh, Windows and Unix machines, HTML files created on any one of these can be viewed with identical appearance on the others.

Netscape and HTML have a number of limitations in their use for computer-based instruction, but also have a number of strengths which make the combination particularly suitable for the current Immunology project. Netscape is only one of a range of HTML browser client applications which include Mosaic and MacWeb.

The system has no simple mechanism for storing student responses, though multiple-choice questions have been implemented using server software. It has no inbuilt memory variables and its adjustments are binary, all or nothing. For better or worse, it transfers decision-making to the user.

Colour is used in a restrained manner in the interface. Equations and tables can only be included as images, and it would be difficult to write an interactive simulation in HTML. The provision of control buttons speeds interaction, but the inability of the author to enable only selected controls increases the "noise" in the interface. The scrolling interface makes the comparison of texts difficult, as does the inability of the user to set marks within a text.

On the other hand, its cross-platform access is transparent to the author, greatly increasing the potential market for educational courseware without additional investment. It is easy for an author to create hypermedia links, it has a simple and fast search function and an ever-present Back button.

In the current project, the Netscape interface is extremely appropriate. Much of the material the students must use in their learning process away from the computer is in the form of journal articles. The clean display of text by Netscape mimics these to a useful extent and reduces the dissonance arising from their transfer to the screen.

HTML "programs" are readable in and can be modified by any word processor. The language has few elements; add-ons to popular word-processors will soon make the creation of HTML mark-ups quite straightforward for any computer user. The updating and maintenance of educational software will be much more likely to occur if it is written in HTML rather than using any of the authoring tools mentioned above.

In our specific instance the single storage site and ease of modification of the material is valuable. The lists of references must be updated at least annually. They could in fact be updated by clerical staff on an almost daily basis.

Another advantage of using HTML for this project is the potential for the lists of reference papers to include hypertext links to research papers which are published on the Internet. These could be regularly updated without difficulty to integrate current best practice wherever it is identified. A Web search engine could also be linked into the courseware and used to supplement the sources identified by students in their assigned research tasks.

End-user programming has been held up as a beacon since the advent of Apple's Hypercard on the Macintosh. HTML and Web tools such as Netscape have so many simple but profound values that they may in fact become as important as Hypercard was once believed to be. Does Netscape represent freedom from programmers and the beginning of interactive multimedia "for the rest of us"?


The Current Collage

The project has been implemented as a collection of linked HTML files, available for inspection through the CIMIT home page [HREF1] where it is identified as Laboratory Competencies in Immunology.

There are currently approximately The total disk space used by these files is approximately 3 megabytes.

The structure implemented is largely as described above, with the addition of a simple support file dealing with the Netscape interface and an overview file to establish the landmarks of the knowledge space.

diagram of the topic files, tips, overview and glossary spaced around the Problems
Figure 4: Arrangement of the Material

The system has been used on standalone Macintosh computers (Centris 650, LCIII and Quadra 610) and on an Ethernet LAN over AppleShare. No technical difficulties were encountered. In the case of the LAN, the browser software was located on each machine, the data files and Home Page on the server.

This single storage is a feature of client server systems and the Web. It will potentially allow users at other institutions to make use of the material without a local installation.

The speed of response is adequate but by no means as rapid as courseware produced in a conventional authoring system.

Problems associated with the creation and use of a glossary have been discussed by Gotts and Makray (1993). They identified access speed as a critical factor in encouraging student use. The glossary material has been broken into four files in order to reduce the initialisation time. There is a separate but acceptable processing time as the .au file and the helper application are loaded following the student's click on an audio button.

The system will be used in Term 2 supporting the student assignments described above.


Preliminary Evaluations

The paper resources were used in 1994 to carry out the student tasks described above. Student attitudes to the subject in question were surveyed using the University's standard Student Feedback Questionnaire. This uses a 5-point Likert scale, from Very Low to Very High. Selected results are tabulated below.

Table of student feedback results
Figure 5: Student Responses

These clearly indicate the students' satisfaction with the processes employed.

Student trials of the prototype computer-based system during development resulted in some changes to the links available and to the glossary structure. The students found the system easy to drive and understand.

Conclusion

Netscape is an appropriate tool to introduce hypermedia support to the existing processes of learning laboratory competencies. HTML material is easily used, distributed and maintained. The availability of cross-platform implementations of the common Web browsers will greatly broaden the application of this and similar courseware.

References

AGPS, Improving University Teaching 1994 National Teaching Development Projects , AGPS 1993

Bearman M., M. Kidd and B. Cesnik, "Degrees of Freedom: Guided Learning vs Hypermedia" in Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of ASCILITE , UNE Northern Rivers, 1993, p34

Christie, A. and D. Thiele, "Windows-based Multimedia Development in Business Information Systems", in Proceedings of APITITE 94, Brisbane 1994, p1005

Cooper, G., "Cognitive load theory as an aid for instructional design", in Australian Journal of Educational Technology , 6, 2, p 108, 1990

Ellis, A., "CD-ROM production: A case history", in B.Chia, R.Pennell and R.Sims (Eds) A Future Promised, Proceedings of the 1992 Conference of ASCILITE , Sydney, 1992, p357

Gotts, A. and J. Makray, "Quality Assurance and Computer-Assisted Learning: Making the Next Project Better" in Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of ASCILITE , UNE Northern Rivers, 1993, p 309

Nielsen, J., Hypertext and HypermediaAcademic Press, London, 1990

Pennell, R., "Screen and Lesson Design in Computer-based Pharmacology Tutorials" in Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of ASCILITE , UNE Northern Rivers, 1993, p 466

Stanton, N.A. and C. Baber , "The Myth of Navigating in Hypertext: How a 'Bandwagon' Has Lost Its Course!", in Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia (1994) 3, 235-249

Stevens, R.H. "Search path mapping: A Versatile Approach for Visualising Problem-Solving Behaviour." , in Academic Medicine 66, S73-75, 1991

Stevens, R.H., J.M. McCoy and A.R. Kwak, "Solving the Problem of How Medical Students Solve Problems.", in Amia News, Educational Software, 8 No. 1, 13-20, 1991

Stevens, R.H. and K. Najafi "Artificial Neural Networks as Adjuncts for Assessing Medical Students¹ Problem Solving Performances on Computer-Based Simulations." , in Computers and Biomedical Research 26, 172-187, 1992

Hypertext References

HREF 1
http://www.nepean.uws.edu.au/cimit/ - Home Page: CIMIT.
HREF 2
http://www.st.nepean.edu.au/ - Home Page: Science and Technology
HREF 3
ftp://coombs.anu.edu.au/coombspapers/otherarchives/caut-archives/ - The CAUT archives at ANU
HREF 4
http://www.csu.edu.au/links/ozweb.html - an interactive map of Australia

Copyright

© Southern Cross University, 1995. Permission is hereby granted to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction at educational institutions provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. Permission is also given to mirror this document on WorldWideWeb servers. Any other usage is expressly prohibited without the express permission of Southern Cross University.
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