Transcript to the slides used in the presentation, in English, in the format

Developing learning materials
efficiently for web access
as well as for printing and for
projection in a classroom
Paul Nieuwenhuysen
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
and
• Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen,
Belgium
[email protected]
Presented at the WEBNET 2000 conference
in San Antonio, Texas, USA
Developing Learning Materials
ABSTRACT / SUMMARY
• A strategy is presented for the development of learning
materials that are suitable
»for the creation of printed study materials
»for projection during group meetings with the students
»for access through the WWW
• Maintaining and developing 1 master for each
document saves time and avoids differences between
various versions.
Learning Materials:
Teaching Supported by Print-outs
Lecturer
Author
Creator
Sender
Students
Readers
Users
Receivers

Developing Learning Materials:
Printouts + Projection
Lecturer
Author
Creator
Sender
Students
Readers
Users
Receivers

Developing Learning Materials:
Through the Web Only
Lecturer
Author
Creator
Sender
Students
Readers
Users
Receivers
WWW

Developing Learning Materials
Combination of Teaching Methods!
Lecturer
Author
Creator
Sender
Students
Readers
Users
Receivers
1 master
document
WWW
J
Computer Programs Used to Create
the Learning Materials
The applied programs are common, cheap, well
documented, and well updated:
• For the Web site that serves as a framework for access
through the WWW: Microsoft FrontPage.
• For slide presentations:
Microsoft PowerPoint, saving each presentation as a
PPS show file (the master) from which a version for the
web is derived in XML/HTML.
• For other documents than presentations:
Microsoft Word, saving most files
in Rich Text Format or in XML/HTML format.
Computer Programs Used to Create
the Learning Materials
• Most work has been done
with at least two of the previous versions and
with the present version 2000 of these programs.
Network-supported Communication
to Support Learning
• Communication student-lecturer + student-student is
supported by
»standard Internet electronic mail and by
»a discussion group through e-mail or the WWW
• Everyone can use common client programs for e-mail
and for web browsing, that have already been set-up
and mastered.
Nobody has to learn and maintain yet another
program.
Documents / Files
Created and Made Available
• For each course, an overview of the contents, the
aims, and the evaluation procedure.
• Series of slides (presentations) offer the course
contents, including questions, tasks, problems,
practical exercises and links to external information.
Each presentation file covers a “chapter”.
• One table of contents for all the slides.
• A bibliography for each chapter.
+ a minimal set of HTML pages that serve as container
for those documents on WWW.
Hyperlink Maintenance in the
Learning Materials
• Many of the created documents contain links to webbased sources, and FrontPage can be used efficiently
to check those links and to repair the links, because all
the files made by the various programs are
incorporated in one Frontpage ‘web’.
PowerPoint 2000 ’s
Yields Better Web Pages (1)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 allows saving slide
presentations as web pages with XML and dynamic
HTML that use the display better, because the pages
are like slides created with the particular limited
display format in mind, which is not the case with most
classical HTML pages that require scrolling for a
complete view.
PowerPoint 2000 Yields
Better Web Pages (1 illustrated)
• Classical web HTML pages
that require scrolling
• Web pages created with
PowerPoint 2000
PowerPoint 2000 ’s XML / HTML
Yields Better Web Pages (2)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 allows saving slide
presentations as web pages with XML and dynamic
HTML that offer most features of a slide presentation
such as
»a table of contents,
»additional text notes displayed under each slide,
»graphics that can be animated and that are resized
together with the text and other parts of the slide,
»slide transition effects,
»full screen display if wanted,…
Word 2000’s XML / HTML Yields
Powerful Documents
• Microsoft Word 2000 allows saving documents as
XML/HTML pages
»that can be displayed by a browser that is available free
of charge and that is already present on most public
access pc’s,
»that can contain active hyperlinks when viewed on the
Internet,
»that can be printed (using Word 2000) with
formatting (such as page breaks) as intended by the
author !
Some Problems Solved during
Development of the System (1)
• The conversion of PowerPoint version 95 files to
version 97 files caused an inversion of many arrows in
the images on the slides…
• The conversion of PowerPoint 97 to 2000 caused two
colors of the existing color schemes to be taken as
indicators of unvisited and visited hyperlinks.
Consequently, colors indicating links were not
suitable, but changing these colors caused unwanted
changes in other parts also…
Some Problems Solved during
Development of the System (2)
• For some presentation files that had been developed
with earlier versions of PowerPoint, the conversion to
the PowerPoint 2000 format was impossible.
It was found out that this was due to particular slides
that contained charts.
When these were deleted, conversion was possible.
Some Problems Solved during
Development of the System (3)
• The transition from FrontPage 98 to 2000 forced us to
convert the web from mixed case to lowercase only, as
we use Unix servers that are case sensitive…
• Saving Word 2000 and PowerPoint 2000 files in HTML
format (including XML) has become more powerful but
also more complicated.
Insufficient help is provided by the software package
to understand the process and to make reasonable
decisions…
Topics of the Learning Materials
Created and Made Available
The topics / contents are all related to
information literacy,
mainly focusing on
»applications of information technology, and on
»information retrieval.
Use
of the Materials Developed
• The courses for which this strategy is developed,
tested and applied are organised at the
»Vrije Universiteit Brussel
»University of Antwerp
in Belgium.
and at the
Availability of Learning Materials
Developed
• Up to now the starting point is
http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/courses/
• Accessible by anyone free of charge.
• This web site makes available now about 100 Mbytes
in more than 10 000 files
in more than 100 folders/directories.
Thank you
Any questions?