Developing Courseware

The courseware we provide to our students consists of a few key components that aim to provide an integrated learning environment that can supplement lectures and laboratory teaching or exist as a stand alone self-study medium. This has several advantages:

• Students can progress at their own pace and perhaps study course material in an order best suited to their abilities.
• The information is stored on-line and offers virtually unlimited access for students. Information stored in hardcopy form, in libraries say, are limited to library opening hours and in numbers of copies available.
• Flexibility - a number of technologies (e.g. text, images, sound) and methodologies (e.g notes) can be used.
• Students can make mistakes and not feel embarrassed as they might be in a class situation.
• Algorithm Animation - Scope exists for programs and algorithms to be animated graphically and textually in order to explain and illustrate key programming concepts. To date many animators [5] behave a bit like debuggers in that code can be inspected and variable states viewed. Dynamic data structures can be graphically illustrated.
• Key concepts and good practices can be shared amongst a variety of courses.
• Alternative and/or comprehensive course material can be delivered.

The courseware modules we have implemented currently integrate the following:

• Course notes, reading lists, class information.
• Program listings.
• Links to run programs and view program output.
• Exercises.
• Solutions to exercises.
• Other sources of information.

The WWW seems an ideal choice for a mechanism providing the above, for the following reasons:

• It is device independent - running across a variety of different machines.

• Global access to information. Links can be provided to documents anywhere on the WWW.
• Information can also be shared. One document can be linked into many other documents thus reducing storage overheads. Note that information can be shared globally
• A range of different network protocols can be integrated together.
• Many of the browsers (e.g. Mosaic) provide ready made and easy to use interfaces. The look and feel on the interface is very intuitive in keeping with conventional graphical user interface design. User interaction is provided via forms based methods.
• Existing electronic forms of information can be readily converted into HTML. Many converters are available to achieve this.