Kathy Lynch, Lecturer - Educational Multimedia, Monash University / Faculty of Education Wellington Road CLAYTON Victoria 3168 Australia, Phone: +61 3 990 59189 Fax: : +61 3 990 52779 Kathy.Lynch@education.mona sh.edu.au [HREF1] Monash University [HREF2]
Course Information, Database, Web Database, Casey Institute, TAFE, Australia, Educational Administration
The use of databases have been an integral part of business for many years. Customer data, details about a companies product lines and personnel information, just to name a few, have been stored in a database of one kind or another. There is no need to go into the advantages of using a database in business, as it is an old tale. But, what is new, is that over the last 12 months, database on the web has been 'birthed'. Expectation in the business world of the end-user to have the capacity to search and quickly retrieve mass amounts of data is commonplace; the web is now no longer novel or different. It is a business platform. And education is big business. The emergence of applications to assist the web page designer in the construction (or 'webising') of databases, has illuminated this trend.
The product behind this paper was inspired by a keynote speaker at AusWeb96 [HREF4], Hermann Maurer, [Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria, 'On Second Generation WWW Systems']. He spoke about the use of databases on the web. Over the past 12 months Casey Institute of TAFE (Victoria / Australia) has designed, developed and is effectively using a web database for information regarding the courses available at the Institute.
In this paper I provide an overview of the development process of this web database - known as the Casey Course Directory [HREF5], and the 'spin-offs' of the product to Casey Institute.