George Ivanoff, Academic Projects Officer, Open Learning Australia,
Level 6, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria, 3000, Australia.
Phone: +61 03 9903 8938, Fax: +61 03 9903 8966
E-mail: george.ivanoff@ola.edu.au
Open Learning Australia Web site: http://www.ola.edu.au
Small Business Management Training in Australia Web site:
http://www.ola.edu.au/smallbus/
World Wide Web, Small Business, Management, Training, Tertiary Education, TAFE, University, Australia, Educational Resources.
Open Learning Australia (OLA) recently set up a Web site called Small Business Management Training in Australia (SBMTA). The construction of this site, as with any site, was a long process with many steps -- from the gathering of information, to the structuring of that information, to the design of the site itself. All these steps are crucial to the production of a functional, user-friendly site that actually delivers the information it purports to.
This poster will look at the construction of the SBMTA site, examining in particular the structure of the information and the design of the site. A major focus of the poster will be the decision to use frames and how problems inherent with this decision were overcome.
OLA is a national education broker providing bridging, TAFE, undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional and continuing education through off-campus methods. There are 29 Australian institutions providing units and modules of study through OLA, with a number of these also providing pathways into qualifications.
Originally owned by Monash University, the shareholding was broadened in January 1997 to be more representative of the Australian post-secondary sector. OLA now has eight shareholders -- the Australian National University, Curtin University of Technology, Griffith University, Macquarie University, Monash University, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, the University of Queensland and the University of South Australia.
OLA provides education through innovative and accessible methods. It has utilised television, radio, audio and video cassettes and computer assisted learning packages. In 1995 OLA began to establish a presence on the World Wide Web. This presence has since expanded to include a range of information for both students and provider institutions including radio and television timetables, links to resources and the entire Student Handbook.
In providing further resources for its diverse range of students OLA is now hosting a second Web site -- Small Business Management Training in Australia (SBMTA).
OLA was identified in The Report of the Industry Task Force on Leadership and Management Skills (known as The Karpin Report) as an appropriate coordinator for a project to "establish an open learning network for the delivery of management education to professional small to medium sized enterprises" (Recommendation 26). [Enterprising Nation, 1995]
As part of its Small - Medium Enterprise project OLA identified a need for accessible information regarding enterprise training in Australia. The World Wide Web was seen as an appropriate and accessible medium for the delivery of such a resource.
The purpose of the SBMTA Web site is to act as a launching pad to courses offered not only through OLA, but through TAFE, universities and private providers across the country. The site lists appropriate courses, provides contact details and, where available, links to the relevant institutions' Web sites.
The Web site is quite unique in the Australian Small Business environment as well as unique in training Web sites. OLA, through DEETYA seed funding, took on the task to create, update and maintain a site of all interested providers at no extra charge to any institution concerned.
An Open Tender Expression of Interest was placed in The Australian newspaper calling for interested institutions to complete a proforma. Information supplied would form the basis of the site. Over 200 institutions requested the tender information. Yet despite this response only some 30 institutions chose to become involved. These institutions completed instructions providing all information in both printed format and as text files on disk so that the information could readily be imported into html documents.
Once responses from institutions had been collated, work began on the structure and design of the site. This site was then placed in a test directory on the OLA server and contributing institutions were asked to examine it and provide feedback. Once feedback had been received and assessed, work began on the final site.
OLA wanted to provide students with an alphabetical index to search for the information they needed. Initially it was decided to divide such an index into the three categories that students were most likely to want to search -- 'Institution', 'Subject' and 'Course'. However, once the information was organised in this way it became apparent that such a division was inappropriate. Listing under both 'Subject' and 'Course' resulted in an unnecessary overlap of information, as follows:
The term 'course' also came into question. Some institutions listed entire courses (Diplomas, Certificates, etc), while other listed individual units or modules, while still others had resource based learning packages. So it was decided to drop 'Course' as a category, listing the various courses, units and packages under subject headings instead.
While implementing this it also became apparent that there was some variation in the modes by which the courses and units were offered. It was feasible that students may want to conduct a search by the offer mode. An isolated rural student, for example, might only be interested in what s/he could study off-campus. So the third category thus became 'Mode', under which can be seen which institutions provide on-campus and off-campus studies.
The initial design was a standard site with a menu on the home page leading students to the three alphabetical indexes. From there, no matter what page the students went to, there would be a menu-bar at the bottom of the page allowing them to go to any of the three indexes or the home page. The menu, however, was not very prominent in this format.
The second design provided a menu bar down the left-hand side of each page. While this was certainly more prominent at first, it was lost when a user began to scroll down a long page.
'Frames are often just another techno-feature people use to make their pages 'cool'.' [Siegal, p.85]
Finally, after much hesitation and thought, the decision was made to go with a frames-based site. There are many inherent problems with implementing a frames-based site, but it was felt that these could be overcome and that the nature and structure of the information warranted the approach.
It is expected that the Web site will continue to grow as more institutions will request to be included. With a large quantity of information set out on many pages of varying lengths that can be searched for in three different indexes, it was imperative that students be able to get to any of those three indexes with the minimum of hassle. The only way to achieve this was to have a constantly visible menu through the use of frames.
Frames cut down the viewable information space by displaying a page only within a portion of the browser window, rather than the full window. Too many sites do not cater for this problem, including, for example, tables or graphics requiring surfers to scroll horizontally. The pages for a frames-based site, therefore, need to be designed to fit within that reduced space. Tables and graphics need to be small enough to fit into the reduced space without the need for horizontal scrolling.
Viewable space becomes even more of a problem when a frames-based site includes links to other sites, with the problem compounding if those other sites are also frames-based (ie frames within frames). The SBMTA Web site needed to have outside links to the providing institutions without the problem of reduced viewable space. The solution was to use TARGET='_parent' with the outside link tags, returning the student to a full browser window as they leave the site.
A frames-based site can slow down viewing because, in effect, each frame is a separate document that needs to be downloaded. There is no way to prevent this, but the effects can be minimised.
The SBMTA Web site only contains two frames (all that is necessary), and the pages are kept as 'light' as possible by not incorporating too many graphics.
Students are also provided with the option to remove the frames if they so choose. They will then view the homepage, and subsequent pages, within the full browser window. A text menu is provided on each page to cater for this option. The frames version and the non-frames version use the same pages, thus minimising maintenance.
What about browsers which are not capable of viewing frames?
This problem is simply overcome with the inclusion of the <NOFRAME> and </NOFRAME> tags. The content between these tags is displayed by browsers not capable of viewing frames. A student accessing the SBMTA Web site with a frames-incapable browser gets the following message:
'If you are viewing this text, you are using a Web browser that does not support frames. CLICK HERE for the non-frames version of the Small Business Management Training in Australia Web site.'
By clicking the hypertext link the student is taken to the homepage displayed within the full browser window.
Given that this is a simple procedure it is surprising that so many sites do not ulitise it.
After viewing the site in the test directory many of the provider institutions requested changes to the content, but none of them suggested any changes to the structure or design. It is, as yet, too early for student feedback but should any future suggestions be made regarding the structure and design of the site they will be given serious consideration.
Creating a site such as the SBMTA Web site takes a great deal of planning and preparation. Once on-line, there is also the need to remain flexible. The site currently appears to meet the needs that it was created for, but enhancement and modification are possibilities that can never be dismissed. The World Wide Web is a medium that is far from static, and a useable Web site needs to be able to change in order to maintain its useability.
"Enterprising Nation, Executive Summary: Report of the Industry Task Force on Leadership and Management Skills", Australian Government Publishing Service, April 1995.
K Schengili-Roberts (1997), "The Advanced HTML Companion", AP Professional, USA.
D Siegel (1996) "Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design", Hayden Books, Indiana, USA.
George Ivanoff ©, 1997. The author 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 grants a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, 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.