Online Education is different to most web work

Web sites often share the same objective as print material: they talk to the audience - the information mostly flows in one direction (with exceptions).

Online education is a much more sophisticated process. Information is provided to the student (as per reading a text book). But the student needs to be led through the material in a structured, timely manner - part of the teaching process. As the student progresses, they need ready access to all the material they have read and/or have available to them - this makes site navigation systems a priority issue and to a depth most commercial web sites never require.

Experience

In addition to teaching web development classes at Armidale TAFE, I have been involved in developing Web and WebCT teaching materials for the University of New England (Australia) - UNE. Some of the Departments I have worked with include;

* School of Mathematical and Computing Science
* School of Psychology
* School of Finance, Economics, Business and Law
* School of Chemistry
* Teaching and Learning Centre (the Dep't providing support to academics)

As the teaching units are all behind password restricted access I can't link directly to the pages - I regret I can not illustrate my WebCT work here as it all exists behind student or academic access restrictions, BUT I can link to the publicly accessible Psychology web based project though.

Example: WebStat at UNE

An example of the web based material is the WebStat Project for the UNE School of Psychology. This project centred on moving the teaching materials across to the web and developing a site structure where the more interactive tutorials and other materials could be added.

The masthead from the Descriptive Statistics Chapter of the Subject/Unit Materials appears here:

This illustrates the need to provide easy access to all depths of the documentation for the student.
The masthead provides access to:

• Major site sections (all 4) and the site top page (logo)
• Major Topics (yellow background) with current topic highlighted
• Subheadings in the Topic (orange background)
• Previous and Next page progression (also at page bottom) for use as the student progressively reads.

All of these navigation elements appear in a neat set at the top of every page.

While working in the UNE Teaching and Learning Centre I processed materials from a number of different schools. During that Time I prepared a Microsoft Word search and replace script which would search through the document and replace unsuitable characters with web ready replacements and apply formatting where it could. For example, Microsoft Word often inserts characters from the Windows Extended Character Set - these will not render reliably on the internet - these were replaced. Also some formatting can be applied such as making all paragraphs separated consistently instead of one, two or three line spacings depending on the original author.

Page Elements

Within a page there are often elements which are complex enough to treat separately. Graphics, animations and movies are not just essential they are expected within a web page when expanding on a topic or to illustrate it in a complimentary manner.

Movies

One subject I helped with added included movies in which students gave their personal comments on what they had learned from the study. This highlights two aspects, a good use of multimedia to remind students they are not alone and, that movies can be made and delivered in an effective manner on the internet. An example of just how much a movie can be compressed is available, where a 56 megabyte movie was compressed to 893 kilobytes.

Animations

I have prepared a number of animations for various teaching units. some of these are derived from static images in printed materials, some were original creations derived from discussions with academics. These differ from movies in that animations are drawings/pictures which are made to move as opposed to movies which are created from a camera (film or video). I have a digital camera which is available for taking original digital picture and I can arrange to have the picture converted into a number of different forms, including storage on film or video (an efficient way of storing large numbers of pictures for display).