HTML: On and Off the Web

Kathy Lynch, Resource Developer, Multimedia Development Unit, Casey Institute of Technical and Further Education, 121 Stud Road, Dandenong Victoria 3175 Australia, Phone: +61 39212 4581 Fax :+61 39212 4999, Email: klynch@casey.vic.edu.au, Home page: http://www.casey.vic.edu.au/dept/mdu/

keywords: World Wide Web, HTML, TAFE, Training, Education, Cezanne, Art

Introduction

This poster describes the ideas, procedures and practicalities of producing simple hypertext materials for the delivery of learning materials on and off the Web. For this project a unit of work on Cezanne, from the Associate Diploma of Art & Design (Victoria) /Context and Culture curriculum, was selected.

Background

Casey Institute of TAFE is a multi-campus Institute, servicing a large area in the south east region of Victoria / Australia. Currently there are five campuses which are situated within this region, extending from Dandenong to Wonthaggi. The Institute believes in, and tries to achieve, equality across all campuses. With the advent of the Internet and its spread to the desks of students (and teachers), the accessibility of Casey Insitute courses can be be expanded to a much broader range of potential students. With this in mind, the Art and Design department was looking for an effective way of delivering the same information to students at suburban (Dandenong) and country (Wonthaggi) campuses.

The Project

This project aims to produce:

a prototype for flexible resources which can be easily and quickly developed by the classroom teacher/lecturer. With little modification, the unit of work can be delivered just as easily off the WWW as on it, making the resource suitable to flexible delivery.
a set of initial guidelines to assist developers in creating flexible resources using HTML.

An authoring language which was easy to learn, transparent to the end-user platform (IBM or Mac), quick, flexible and inexpensive was needed. Hypermedia the selected concept, HTML the selected language .

Using hypermedia as the navigation methodology for the resource seemed advantageous and uncombersome. Advantageous because of the freedom hypermedia allows the user studying the unit. Uncombersome becauses using the same structure for both Interent and non-Internet resource materials should reduce the development workload of teachers, and create uniformity for students studying, no matter the mode of delivery. Developing the Cezanne resource using hypermedia will allow (and encourage) creativity, innovation and self expression as found common in many artist and students studying art. (This is yet to be proven, as the trialing had not begun at the time of the AusWeb96 conference)

Processes and Procedures

ie how we worked, (rested) and played

Processes:

Meeting between Art teachers and resource developer to develop a broad idea of the look/feel of the unit
Storyboard on how the teacher usually teachers the unit
Viewed various art CD-ROMs to get an idea of an interface
Designed a prototype for the contents page (index.htm) for design confirmation
Search for hypermedia and 'non-virtual' links and information sources
Collected and converted content (text and images). These were in both Macintosh and Windows format
Edited / re-created images to display the artistic concepts mentioned in the content eg structure
Re-worked contents page and develop other pages
Documented additional ideas (for now or later inclusion)
Built web pages with the inclusion of all types of links (ie hypermedia and non-virtual)

Procedures:

Select a HTML editor (Windows), for this projects used Web Author Lite
Set design guidelines for web pages to ensure consistency
Set sizes for thumbnails and exploded images
Define the HTML tags/elements to be used (or not to be used, such as frames)
Develop simple training for the use of HTML and the HTML editor

Trialing the Resource

The Cezanne resource is to be trialed at the main suburban campus (Dandenong), and the country campus (Wonthaggi).

For the initial trialing, the unit will be delivered under two situations:

in a lecture theatre (Dandenong) with a lecturer, a computer (Cezanne resource on the hard disk or CD-ROM) and a projection screen, and
in a classroom (Wonthaggi) with a supervisor / computer technician, and a computer connected to the Internet

Student's and lecturer's opinions of the materials and the delivery method will be questioned and correlated.

Conclusion

The Cezanne project will not only develop a resource suitable for flexible delivery, but will:

provide Institute guidelines and templates for the production of flexible resource materials for delivery on/off WWW. This will instil some consistently in the products being developed throughout the Institute
develop the HTML skills within the Art & Design department. These skills can then be used for the development of other flexible materials. In addition to this, staff from the Art & Design department could then assist in the HTML resource development in other departments
create an acceptance and utilisation of the WWW as a delivery strategy and teaching aid

The on-line version of Casey Institute's Cezanne resource can be found at http://www.casey.vic.edu.au/dept/art/lessons/cezanne/

Future Research

The development of the Cezanne resource is intended as only a beginning. As it says on the advertising board near Melbourne airport "There is a beginning.....a middle...then another beginning" At Casey Institute we will continue with projects like this one, building on the knowledge gained from ours and others developments, to make flexible delivery truely flexible learning. [The incorporation of virtual reality, Java, video conferencing, on-line chat and listserv are currently under investigation

References

Interactive Media R.Rada, 1995 Springer-Verlag
Advances in Human Factors / Ergonomics Cognitive Engineering in the Design of Human-Computer Interaction and Expert Systems editor G.Savendy, 1987 Elsevier Science Publishing Company Inc
http://edx1.educ.monash.edu.au/projects/ Monash University/School of Graduate Studies/Faculty of Education

Copyright

Kathy Lynch © 1996. The authors assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.

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