Adapting Authoring Methodologies to WWW Environments


Andrew J Cole and Kenneth Tait
University of Leeds


ABSTRACT

Currently the conventional authoring methodologies for (multimedia) computer based learning materials produce "assets" such as image sets, multiple choice questions etc. which are placed in tutorial or hypermedia programs for delivery to the users, typically locally or through shared file store on local area networks. The objective is to adapt the methodologies and supporting software tools to release and incorporate these assets, and the tools, for development and delivery within a WWW environment.

At Leeds software has been developed which allows teacher (or student) authors to specify interactions and presentation formats and to provide materials which when placed within these formats are automatically converted and compiled to run as Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook programs. The system (the Interactive Document Compiler - IDC) is based on SGML-compliant markup techniques which indicate the functional and display attributes required by the materials. Using IDC applications have been produced in a variety of subjects including English, Medicine, Textiles, Biology, Pharmacology and Teaching Competencies.

More recently work has focussed on the production of visual authoring tools which support the authors in the structuring and organisation of their content. These tools enable the user to develop their materials and manage their resources (video, images, audio etc.) in a natural style whilst maintaining the resources in the form of markup for compilation (with IDC) and delivery as compiled Toolbook applications. Current work is concentrating on generalising these authoring tools and placing them within a WWW framework but more especially in developing the opportunities for delivering the materials within a WWW browser, initially utilising the Toolbook plug-in for Netscape Navigator but with the objective of supporting the user interactions with Java applets generated directly from the toolset's interaction styles. Delivery of materials within a WWW browser environment opens up ready access to, and integration with, other resources including WWW delivered documents, simulations and other learning environments implemented as plug-ins and can also provide consistent access to student records and many other services based on WWW technology.

This paper will describe the authoring methodologies and development tools which have been produced and used in Leeds (and elsewhere) using Asymetrix Toolbook as the delivery engine and demonstrate the advantages of the original strategic decision to generate deliverable materials from a common markup base.

Keywords: courseware development, authoring methodologies, document markup, multimedia, visual authoring tools.

Introduction

The design and production of computer-based learning materials (often called "courseware") has progressed uncertainly from the use of the author languages of the seventies, through the authoring systems of the eighties to the multimedia software development systems of today. Alongside this use of special-purpose systems has been the employment of general-purpose programming languages, artificial intelligence techniques and other conventional computing methodologies. Often changes in the technology at both hardware and software levels have left the authoring systems behind, forcing those who wish to take advantage of the latest computing systems to create courseware using inappropriate, but available tools. This can be seen in the early and widespread use of BASIC that followed on the increasing availability of microcomputers in the eighties and now as the pressure to exploit the obvious advantages of Wide World Web technology compels authors to work in HTML and Java. Consequences of this have been the loss of much valuable material and the continual re-creation of existing courseware. In the Computer Based Learning Unit at the University of Leeds we have tried to break this cycle by separating the content of the material from the means and methods of delivery, in particular, in recent years we have used marked up text as the basis for the production of materials of various kinds, on the grounds that such marked up documents can specify the content and structure of the material (including "assets" in various media) in a way which will give it a long life. Material specified like this requires a "delivery engine" and it is this delivery engine which changes and adapts to the technology environment in which the courseware has to live. A further advantage of the document-centred approach is that tools to support the author in the design and production of documents are independent of the means of delivery.

The Design and Production of Courseware

The economic production and maintenance of computer-based learning materials requires commitment from and involvement by those who have overall responsibility for the management of the course on which the materials are used. These are teachers and tutors. Without their involvement the evolution of the material to meet newly perceived learning needs, or to correct deficiencies in the material, or to adapt to new goals and and objectives cannot be achieved. Courseware which does not evolve, dies. To effectively engage tutors and teachers in the development and evolution of computer-based materials which continue to be valued by their students requires the development of software tools which do not require them to acquire software engineering skills. Rather the tools should allow them to use their existing skills of course specification (mainly content specification and organisation, often as a sequence of events) to provide input to a system which uses the content so provided in a way which takes advantage of the interactive and adaptive nature of computing. Other methods have been tried. Requiring Teachers and tutors to "explain" what they want to (expert) software developers has proved costly and not always satisfactory. Employing relatively inexpensive, enthusiastic, young programmers to work with teachers and tutors may result in effective and useful courseware, but the courseware is rarely well designed (from a computational point of view) and usually proves extremely difficult if not impossible to maintain or modify.

By separating content from delivery the various elements of expertise required to construct worthwhile multimedia computer-based learning materials can be focused on those aspects of the work almost in isolation from the rest. Thus the subject matter expert can set out the content by writing text and specifying other assets (graphics, photographs, animations, video, and so forth). The various assets can be produced by experts in graphics, animation, video production and photography. The interface and delivery engine can be built by competent software designers. Each group will liaise as and when necessary with the pedagogical expert (the teacher or tutor) to check that what is being produced is educationally sound and acceptable. Changes which are perceived as necessary during the development phase can be brought about in one stream of the work without having costly knock-on effects on other aspects.

Interactive Document Compiler

A particular example of this approach is provided by the Interactive Document Compiler (IDC). IDC (Tait, 1995a) is implemented in Asymetrix Toolbook and uses marked-up documents (with SGML-compliant markup schemes) to generate further, independent Toolbook applications. IDC is consistent with an authoring methodology which separates as far as possible content, presentation and interaction (Tait, 1995b). An entity called a "format" combines presentation with interaction, but is content-free. Within the format the separation of presentation and interaction is achieved by using Toolbook objects for the first and Toolbook scripts for the second, as is intended by the designers of Toolbook. The structured content is provided by the author through a marked-up source document together with other files containing, for example, images, graphics, sound and so on. Because any courseware prepared for IDC involves little commitment to IDC, it is possible to contemplate, either now or in the future, using the same documents (possibly edited systematically) with some other means of delivery. By the same token, the design and production of material within a particular project can take place in several parallel streams with the authoring of the documents, the creation of the asset, and the design of the delivery engine (that is the IDC formats) proceeding independently with final courseware being automatically constructed by the compiler at the end. This allows for downstream modification and adjustment in the light of formative evaluation or the reappraisal of the projects objectives.

Up to now IDC has been used to produce hypermedia applications, banks of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and has been shown to be capable of supporting a much wider range of courseware styles. The most significant of these has been an Introduction to Textiles which comprises over 70 hours of materials incorporating over a 1000 graphics, photographs, animations and video clips and some 800 screens of text as well as hundreds of MCQs. This material has replaced the traditional teaching on two one-semester courses. All the material was produced in an 13-month period with half of it being available and used by students after seven months.

The key activities during development in addition to the production of the assets and the writing of the text are the structuring and organisation of the text (that is the marking up of the documents) and the organisation and management of the assets. Those involved in these two activities are to a great extent the only participants who have (or need) an overall view of the project. We have considered their needs in respect of support tools, and although current word processors and multimedia management tools provide some help, these are insufficient to allow subject matter experts to contribute directly. Also we take the view that student projects can be the source of new (prototype) material and if students are to work efficiently and effectively in limited time then such support tools are essential. A pilot exercise involved undergraduate students (in the School of English) adding material to an existing application on Victorian periodicals, and we are currently working with students from the School of Medicine on producing computerised versions of their Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) as part of a special study module for students doing a clinical attachment in Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Visual Authoring Tools

A prototype visual authoring tool, the IDC Development Tool (IDCDT), has been developed to support the production of material consistent with the markup and formats used in the Victorian Periodical Project (VPP). IDCDT (Guest, 1995) is implemented in Visual Basic and provides the courseware developer with a structured editing environment for the production and maintenance of IDC materials and the organisation of multimedia assets. IDCDT uses a model of the IDC formats to construct visual editing templates appropriate to the particular set of interactions used by the project. The tool is capable of accessing assets within an intranet (using HTTP) however the delivery mechanism for the material is usually more restricted and typically depends upon a local shared file system model. IDCDT was used initially to reverse engineer the VPP materials from the hand edited IDC markup and has since been used, mainly by students, to extend these materials and to develop new contexts particularly in Medicine.

This work has highlighted a difficulty which we have yet to tackle. This is the problem of capturing the semantics of the delivery and interaction within the authoring tool and exposing this information to the user of the tool. The authoring tool can quite easily manage libraries of assets (image banks, video clips and so on), but it has, at the moment, to work entirely within the syntax of the marked up document. It has no way of knowing how a portion of text, or a linked asset will actually be used by the delivery system, or how the learner will interact with it. Such semantics are bound up in, in the case of IDC, the format. The format is essentially made up of objects and scripts, that is programming instructions. There is no external representation or specification of the interaction or delivery mechanisms which could be used by the authoring tool as a guide to the functionality of a particular format. In the present example all such information is hard-coded in the authoring tool, and if it is necessary to have the tool handle another format then extra procedures might have to be developed and coded in to handle the idiosyncracies of the new format. This is clearly unsatisfactory. In order for the tool to be general purpose then either it must be able to determine the interaction and delivery functionality, or it must have a library of procedures or gadgets which have a one to one correspondence with the features used to implement the library of formats with which it is to work. Our aim is to investigate the possibility of having some declarative way of indicating the delivery and interaction functionalities so that a single common authoring tool could be used. The MHEG standard and supporting tools addresses some of these issues, but there is a definite problem in systematically specifying interactions and the means by which they are meaningfully populated with content.

Delivery using World Wide Web

There are obvious parallels between the IDC approach and the World Wide Web approach to authoring and delivery. Each separates the content from the delivery; each uses marked-up text as the organising substrate; and each makes no commitment to the delivery engine. They differ in that the output from IDC is typically a free-standing application supported by a rich set of (programmable) interactions in the delivery engine (viewer) whereas WWW materials are constrained by the limited scope of the interactions available within the Web browser.

The possibility that multimedia computer-based learning material could be "authored" in such a way that it could be delivered by a variety of delivery engines running in various computational contexts seems entirely feasible within the WWW framework. At present it is possible to use Toolbook as an external viewer in which the Toolbook application may interact with a Web browser using the DDE protocol (Tosolini, 1995). The Asymetrix Neuron plug-in for Web browsers allows Toolbook applications, possibly of restricted specification, to be seen as a integral part of a Web document, but it is not clear what level of interactivity is supportable between the browser and the plug-in. In the future it should be possible to provide the equivalent interactivity to that provided by IDC and Toolbook by generating Java applets to support the interactions and with appropriate server-side support for the documents being re-structured or re-organised, for example, according to learner performance.

At present we are able to deliver IDC-produced material in stand-alone form for Toolbook 3.0 and 4.0 (with limited WEB access to assets) and are experimenting with the use of Neuron. Developments by Asymetrix (Toolbook II 5.0) may enable progress towards a WWW-integrated method of delivery, but this area has yet to be fully explored.

Conclusions

The IDC System is a practical illustration of an approach to courseware design and production. Toolbook was used because it is straightforward to write scripts and handlers which automatically perform authoring tasks while at the same time permitting the interactive design of screens and specification of functionality. This means that the designer can work much as a conventional Toolbook author works and authors are provided with an automatic process to apply to their organised and structured content. Visual authoring tools, of which IDCDT is just one instance, have proved necessary to support the subject specialist in the development and maintenance of their materials.

Our long term aim is to integrate both authoring and delivery within a networked environment with open connectivity and using open systems. The technology offered by WWW points the way forward. However there are some questions. Do we continue to adapt what we have developed to the Web or do we take a wider view and consider a more general solution? Do we use the protocols of the Web to access the assets? Can we adapt to the Web or other network technology without discarding the technique of compiling? Without compilation into a standalone application (with required assets), the system has to be capable of locating and delivering all assets quickly in order not to destroy the essential continuity of effective computer-based learning materials. When all the assets are locally stored this is no problem as Multimedia Toolbook demonstrates, once a network is involved there are a number of imponderables.

References

Guest D.S. (1995) Hypertext Tools and a Methodology for their use in the Authoring of Hypertext Applications. School of Computer Studies, The University of Leeds, (May 1995).

Tait K. (1995a) The Interactive Document Compiler (Version 3.02, Sampler 3.0c). IDC Technical Report 2, Computer Based Learning Unit, The University of Leeds, (May 1995).

Tait, K. (1995b) Are templates what we need? How to allow courseware to evolve. Proceedings of the UK Toolbook User Conference 94. Centre for Computing in Economics, University of Bristol, (March 1995).

Tosolini P. (1995) Web based Toolbook Applications in the Educational Environment with Susan Logue, UK Toolbook User Conference 95, Bristol, UK.

Biographical Note

Andrew J Cole, is Deputy Director of the Computer Based Learning Unit, Senior Research Fellow and an associate lecturer in the School of Computer Studies at the University of Leeds.

Kenneth Tait, is Principal Research Fellow in the Computer Based Learning Unit at the University of Leeds.

Andrew J Cole
Senior Research Fellow
Computer Based Learning Unit
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
UK
a.j.cole@cbl.leeds.ac.uk
http://www.cbl.leeds.ac.uk/

COPYRIGHT Andrew J. Cole and Kenneth Tait © 1996. The authors assign to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non exclusive license 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 license to the University of New Brunswick 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.

N.A.WEB 96 - The Second International North America World Wide Web Conference http://www.unb.ca/web/wwwdev/ University of New Brunswick.