Figure 1: Making the modules work together
John Eklund, Faculty of Education, The University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 222 Lindfield NSW 2070, Australia. Phone +61 2 9514 5613 Fax: +61 2 9514 5666 j.eklund@uts.edu.au
adaptive, authoring, cgi, database, hypermedia, javascript, navigation, user-model, WWW
In this poster we describe our efforts to integrate Topclass® [HREF1], Javascript and Filemaker Pro into a Web-based learning environment which offers individualised navigation support to students. This continues the development work on the project described in full elsewhere (Eklund & Sawers, 1996; Eklund, 1996) in which we produced a dynamic clickable overview map of hypermedia courseware delivered using the Web based authoring and delivery tool WEST® [HREF2]. We discuss the transition to the TopClass® platform, and outline the nature of the database engine and cgi interface being developed. The aim of the development work is to allow us to test the student's knowledge and track their progress through a learning space, and to represent that progress visually and individually for each student. We focus on technical aspects of implementation in this presentation.
In this poster we report the ongoing development of the WEST-KBNS system [HREF5]. Making use of the WEST® online course delivery software, we initially loaded the courseware into the top frame of a two frame horizontal frameset. The aim was to produce a detailed "history-based" annotated overview map of the nodes in the courseware which would serve as an individualised navigation aid for the student. In this way, the system is adaptive (Brusilovsky, 1996) in that it is changing a visible aspect of the system according to some information about the individual user. The information about the individual is held in a "user-model", part of a Filemaker database.
To achieve this, each page of the courseware included the Javascript:
'<body onload="parent.frames[1].location='links.html'">' which loaded a separate file ('links.html') into the lower frame.
This document extracted the URL of the top document and dynamically built a clickable map of the courseware in the lower frame using a repeating nested if else statement reproduced below.
<script language="javascript">
var topURL=parent.frames[0].document.location
var baseURL="http://www.education.uts.edu.au/west/WEST.acgi?"
var context=topURL.substring(47,68)
document.write('<img src="key.gif" align=right>')
if (topURL==baseURL+context+"Retrieve-Page-191") {
document.write('<font size = -1 color="green">Y1 .</font> ')
} else {
document.write('<font size = -1>Y1 . </font>'.link(baseURL+context+'Retrieve-Page-191" + target="main'))
}
The colour of the hyperlinks changed depending on where the student had been and currently was, ie green for the current page, red for visited, blue for unvisited, and on the basis of a multichoice online test the link was changed to 'blink' to suggest to the student that they proceed further or that they review the courseware. The code was somewhat cumbersome and extremely difficult to debug.
Using the much improved TopClass® system which has in itself greatly improved navigational capabilities compared to the previous WEST® incarnation, the authors are revising and extending the system to include, in the overview map, the annotation of links of:
This is however impossible to achieve with text based hyperlinks as the page or browser has control of the active or visited link colours so we are intending to use a matrix of coloured gif files which will appear as clickable hyperlinks and model the structure and state of the courseware for the user.
On early investigation and dialogue with the developers of WEST/TopClass it seemed that we would be able to access individual elements of the hypertext database, extract the results of each student's test and build the overview map on this basis. Unfortunately this has not been possible as the test pages are built on the fly and do not actually have a URL until the page is finally submitted to the cgi.
We are now producing the page state and testing module in Filemaker Pro [HREF 3] to work (as an adjunct to TopClass) as three related databases:
Once the necessary data structure is in place and working we can use a calculation field within Filemaker to dynamically build the HTML and JavaScript necessary to produce the overview map, customised for each student. In this way the map becomes an individual representation of the student's progress through the courseware, and provides a visual record of what the system knows about their knowledge of the material.
We are evaluating the Lasso.acgi [HREF 4] for the purpose of extracting that HTML from the database and displaying it in the browser window in the lower frame of a frameset similar to that described earlier.
Brusilovsky, P. (1996) Methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 6 (2-3), 87-129.
Eklund J & Sawers J (1996) Resourcing Considerations for Computer Mediated Learning on the Internet. ASCILITE96 Conference, Adelaide. p. 585-587.
Eklund J (1996) Knowledge-Based Navigation Support in Hypermedia Courseware using WEST. Australian Educational Computing. Vol. 11 No. 2, p.10-14.
James Sawers & John Eklund©, 1997. The authors assign 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 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 authors.