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Journal reference: Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Volume 28, issues 7–11, p. 1219.

World Wide Web - Course Tool: An Environment for Building WWW-Based Courses

Murray W. Goldberg
Sasan Salari
Paul Swoboda

Abstract
It is difficult for educators that lack technical background to create sophisticated WWW-based courses. This paper describes Web-CT, an easy-to-use environment for creating WWW-based courses that are otherwise beyond the ability of the non computer programmer. Web-CT not only produces courses for the WWW, but also uses WWW browsers as the GUI for the course-building environment. Web-CT allows the course-author to create a course and then to add a wide variety of tools and features to his or her course. Examples of tools include bulletin-boards, student self-evaluation, navigation tools, timed quizzes, electronic mail, automatic index generation, and more. New features and tools are continually being added to Web-CT.
Keywords
WWW Education Computer-Aided Learning Authoring Environment

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Problem

The University of British Columbia (UBC) and other institutions have been making significant efforts recently to make courses and course material available using the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) [1][3][4][5]. The advantages to students are tremendous including

At UBC our first experiments [1][2] demonstrate that WWW-based courses (with or without accompanying lectures) have the potential to be effective both in terms of student academic performance and student acceptance. We have seen WWW-based courses and supplementary WWW-based course material proliferate. The problem, however, is that the proliferation is much faster, and the level of document sophistication much deeper, in departments where there is a high degree of technical familiarity. Departments such as Computer Science have no trouble taking full advantage of the power of the Web for course delivery. In contrast, other departments that are less technologically focused are either not taking advantage of the WWW or are not exploiting its full power.

It is not the case that these other departments have little interest in making courses and course material available on-line. Many have seen full-featured Web-sites and are enthusiastic about the prospect of placing their material on-line. The problem is that without the technical expertise to use CGIs, they are reduced to either creating only static web pages (no interactivity), or are forced to hire a consultant to do the work for them.

1.2 A Solution

In our experience of creating WWW-based courses, the authors have identified a set of tools and features that are central to many WWW-based courses. We have implemented these tools, and have created a simple-to-use environment for building WWW-based courses and incorporating these tools into the courses. Course authors need no technical expertise; all that is required is that they are capable of using a WWW browser.

1.3 What is (and isn't) Web-CT?

The World-Wide-Web Course Tool (or Web-CT) presents an environment that allows educators, with or without technical expertise, to create sophisticated WWW-based courses. These courses can incorporate any of our (continually growing) set of tools and features. Furthermore, the interface to Web-CT (the interface that is used by the educator to build a course) is entirely WWW-based. This has many advantages including simplicity and platform-independence.

Using Web-CT requires that a course-author connect, using a browser such as Netscape, to a Web-CT site. The site is simply a HTTP server that serves the Web-CT pages and CGI scripts. Normally servers will be maintained centrally at educational institutions or by Internet-service providers. Once the course is built, it can be served from the same server, or can be moved to another.

Web-CT is not an HTML editor. Most people find a basic subset of HTML easy to learn. If the course-author can not learn HTML, he or she has the option of using an HTML editor, or of simply using plain text for course notes. Web-CT allows both.

1.4 Benefits of Web-CT

Web-CT not only provides a set of course tools that can be incorporated into Web-based courses, but also provides an environment for creating and structuring courses, and incorporating these tools.

Web-CT uses the Web as its GUI for building WWW-based courses. One advantage is that WWW-browsers are popular and easy to use. Educators wishing to build WWW-based courses are very likely to have used a browser before and should therefore feel comfortable in the environment. The other advantage of using the WWW as our GUI is platform independence. We need not create special versions of our software for multiple platforms. Likewise, none of our software is installed on user's machines. Instead our software runs on a central server, but is accessible from anywhere a browser can be run.

Another advantage of this setup is that there is no requirement that each course provider set up and maintain their own HTTP server. The expectation is that these servers will be maintained centrally in an organization (such as a university) and will be used by members of that organization. We have created a script that allows simple installation of Web-CT on a HTTP server. The courses that are created using Web-CT are automatically available from the same server that is running Web-CT. The course-author is not required to have any knowledge of HTTP servers at all. Should the author wish to move the completed course to another server, it is a relatively simple matter of moving the created data files and scripts.

Web-CT is also highly adaptable in that new course tools can be added at any time, allowing their incorporation into courses. We are continually getting new ideas and suggestions for useful tools, which we incorporate as we are able.

The remainder of this paper describes Web-CT by first walking through an example session with Web-CT, then by listing the set of tools that can be incorporated into a course built with Web-CT, and finally by providing a summary of the Web-CT implementation. Following these sections conclusions and future work are presented.

2. An example Session With Web-CT

To illustrate further, consider a typical session creating a WWW-based course with Web-CT. First, using a WWW browser, the author will connect to the Web-CT site. Once connected to the site, the author will be asked to authenticate himself or herself. Knowing the identity of the author is necessary for Web-CT in order to determine the location of course contents and user preferences. Now the author has the option of beginning the creation of a new course, or of continuing a previously begun course.

Assuming a new course is being started, the author will be asked to choose a set of defaults to be applied as a template to every page in their course. These defaults are chosen using forms and clickable image maps, and include items such as default page background, page header and/or footer text or images, and bullet icons. These defaults will be applied automatically to every page in the course, but can be overridden for individual pages.

Now the course-author can begin creating course pages. To create a course page, the author has two options. If creating course pages from scratch, the author can use the Web-CT course-editing page. Here, the author is presented with a text-entry box where plain text or HTML can be entered. As an alternative, if existing text or HTML is available, these files can be down-loaded to the Web-CT server and incorporated into the course. If modification is required, the course-editing page can be used to update an existing file.

Once a course page has been down-loaded or as it is being entered, the course-author has the option of incorporating course tools into that page. Tools are added to a page by simply clicking the appropriate button on the course-editing page. The complete list of available tools is described below. As examples, however, tools such as a glossary, a student self-evaluation mechanism, a student page page-annotation mechanism, a bulletin-board, a chat-facility, and an image database can be included in any page. The finished page will appear with a button-bar along the top and/or bottom (this is configurable by the author) containing an icon for each tool incorporated into that page.

Finally, the course-author will need to indicate the relative location of this page in the course. Pages are organized both hierarchically (for instant access to any course topic, subtopic, or individual page), and linearly (to define a usual, linear, path through the course). The finished page will have icons for moving forward and backward along the usual path. It will also contain an icon to display the hierarchical view of the course from which the course can be viewed at any level of granularity. This hierarchical view provides direct links to each course subtopic and page.

The finished product (a web-based course) consists of the set of notes-pages created by the course-author. The notes appear in the middle of each page, and button bars appear at the top and/or bottom providing navigation support and links to tools that have been incorporated. The notes portion of each page appears as entered by the course-author (either as HTML or as preformatted text), with the exception that links from various words in the notes will be automatically created by Web-CT to point to glossary entries. These links are generated when the course is viewed by students; the HTML as entered by the course-author is never altered. Two examples of pages created by Web-CT follow (Figures 1 and 2). These are pages that would be viewed by students using the course.

Figure 1: First Example of a Page Generated by Web-CT

Figure 2:Second Example of a Page Generated by Web-CT

3. Web-CT Tools

This section describes the set of tools that have either already been implemented, or are in the process of being implemented. Tools that are being designed, or that have not yet made it to the design stage are not described here. We are continually thinking of, and implementing new tools for Web-CT.

3.1 Navigation

As described above, the navigation tool allows two concurrent views of the course. The first is a linear view that defines the usual path through the course material. The assumption is that a student with the expected background for the course will want to follow this usual path from beginning to end. Deviations off the usual path can be taken at any time by clicking on any page's button-bar. This allows the exploration of any of the tools that have been incorporated into that page. No matter how far the student strays off the usual path, clicking a single button (the back triangle at the top of any page) will return the student to the point at which he or she left the usual path. The advantage is that the student can return to the correct location in the notes without the frustration of having to re-trace back through the potentially long deviation off the usual path.

The second view of the course that is presented to the student is a hierarchical view. The course pages can be organized by the course-author into a tree. The topics can then be viewed at any level of granularity, and topics may be jumped to directly from that view. The advantage here is that students wishing an unconventional route through the course (either because they are reviewing completed material, or because they have some existing background) can proceed quickly to any part of the course.

The navigation tool also has the ability to record the route that a student is taking through the material. There are two reasons for this. The first is that when a student begins a session viewing course pages, Web-CT automatically places him or her at the location that they were at when they ended their previous session with that course. This removes the need for a student to have to find the correct context every time they sign on to the course. The second reason is that this record of accesses may be of interest to the course providers. It may provide hints as to which pages are popular or troublesome for students.

Note that these navigation features (and other features of Web-CT) require that students using courses created by Web-CT be given accounts and be asked to authenticate themselves before each session. This allows us to know the identity of the student making use of the course tools. Anonymous student access is also allowed, but tools that depend on knowing the identity of the student will not be available in that case.

The following image (Figure 3) is a view of the Web-CT page that the course-author uses to establish the hierarchical relationships and linear ordering of course pages. Note the triangle buttons that allow the course-author to move pages to other locations (up, down, indent, unindent) in the hierarchy. There are also buttons (the angled arrows), that hide or show subtree contents. There is also a button for each page (the red X) that deletes that page from the hierarchy. The linear view of the course is taken as the order of pages starting at the top, and proceeding to the bottom of the hierarchy.

Figure 3: Course Content Organization Page

3.2 Glossary

A searchable glossary of terms can be created by the course-author, and links from the notes to the glossary entries are added automatically by Web-CT. Thus the glossary can be reached by the student in one of two ways: When creating a page of notes, the course-author can view the glossary-editing page (see Figure 4). This page allows the course-author to specify which words in that page of notes will be linked into the glossary. Here, the course-author is presented with a view of that page where each word in the notes that appears in the glossary is highlighted and has a button after it. Only the first occurrence of the word is so highlighted. Clicking on the highlighted word displays a glossary-entry editing page for that word. This allows for easy update of definitions. Clicking the button after the word causes the finished page of notes to have that word linked from there to the glossary. Finally, there is a button at the bottom of the glossary-editing page that allows the addition of new words into the glossary.

Figure 4: Glossary-Tool Editing Page

Figure 5: Student View of Glossary Tool

3.3 External Reference Tool

This tool allows the placement of a button on the button-bar which is linked to an external reference of any kind. We have usually used this to refer to pages in the course text that relate to that page of notes, and to point to URLs of related material. This can, however, be used to contain any kind of external reference. Web-CT provides a set of default fields for reference entries, and allows course-authors to define new ones. Images can also be added to any reference entry (see Figure 6). This is useful, for example, for showing the cover of the text that is being referred to.

Figure 6: Reference-Editing Page

3.4 Automatic Index Generation

This tool allows the automatic creation of an index of course content and terms. The course-author can define a set of words that he or she would like to appear in the index. Web-CT dynamically creates an index which points to pages that contain that word. Index entries are ordered alphabetically. Pages for each entry are listed in order of priority. Higher priority is assigned to pages where the word appears in a title or heading, followed by pages where the word appears in the body of the page.

The course-author is also able to annotate page references in the index in order to explain them further. For example, if the term is World Wide Web, there may be several pages containing that term. Web-CT will create references from the index to all of these pages. The course-author can annotate any or all of the references. For example, the words an introduction to can be used to annotate an entry indicating that this index reference contains an introduction to the World Wide Web.

If the student does not find the term they are looking for in the index, they can enter their own term. A new index entry will be dynamically created showing the course pages where that term occurs, again listed in order of priority.

Finally, an index button can be placed on any or every page's button-bar allowing direct access to the course index.

3.5 Course Bulletin Board

A bulletin-board can be added to any course allowing communication among course participants. This is useful in any course, but is especially useful when course participants are remotely located. In the bulletin-board announcements can be made, and questions can be asked once and answered for all participants to see.

New articles posted to the bulletin board are presented to every participant. Web-CT keeps track of which articles have been read by which participant in order that once someone reads an article, it is not presented to him or her again (unless they elect to view past articles). Bulletin-board articles can be searched for and listed based on article content, author, forum in which it was posted, and date of posting.

The bulletin-board can be referenced either from the tool page (described below) or from a page of notes. Postings made from the tool page are treated in the usual way, with a user-entered subject.

Postings made from a page of notes are generated with a subject line that contains the name of that page. When articles are viewed from a page of notes, only the articles that pertain to that page (and followups to those articles) will be presented. Also, all articles pertaining to that page will be presented regardless of whether they are new, or have been seen before. This creates a running history of the commentary for that page of notes. The idea is that past discussions about a page form part of the learning experience for students new to that page, and are therefore of value.

The bulletin-board is currently being implemented, but the following image (see Figure 7) will closely reflect the final student view of the bulletin-board page.

Figure 7: The Web-CT Bulletin Board Tool

3.6 Chat Facility

Web-CT also provides a chat tool for real-time communication among course participants. The number of chat rooms and the default names for the rooms are configured by the course-author.

The student's view shows the chat rooms, their names, and a list of course participants in each room. A student can enter any room and, if desired, rename that room to advertise the nature of the conversation taking place there. The door to a room can be locked to prevent other students from entering that room. This facilitates private conversations.

3.7 Counter Generation

Web-CT allows the course-author to add a page-reference counter to any page of notes. Counting references is often of interest both to course users and course implementors. The style and font of the counter is configurable. Figure 8 is an image of the page that allows the addition of a counter to a course page.

Figure 8: Access-Counter Construction Page

3.8 Timed Quiz-Taking Facility

Quizzes can be set up by the course providers. The student's view of a quiz consists of a set of questions, with each question followed by a text entry box for the answer. When the quiz is created, a date is specified. The quiz will only be available to students on the specified date.

Once the student accesses the quiz, a record of the start time is made at the server. The student is responsible for submitting his or her answers before the time allotted for the quiz has expired. There is a button on the quiz page that a student can press to determine how much time remains.

When the quiz answers are submitted, they are saved for the course administrator. A record is made at the top of the answers indicating the time of day that the quiz was written, and the length of time the student took to complete the quiz. The quiz results can be viewed by the course administrator using the Quiz Result Viewing Page.

3.9 Student Self-Evaluation

Multiple-choice questions can supplement any page of notes. If there are any such questions associated with a page, Web-CT generates a button on the button bar for that page to make them accessible. Clicking on that button presents the questions.

Every question is followed by a list of potential answers with a button beside each. The student marks the (hopefully) correct answer and presses the submit answers button. At that point a page is presented restating the question and the selected answer with an indication of whether the question was answered correctly, and an explanation as to why the submitted answer was correct or incorrect.

The course-author creates questions (including their potential answers and an explanation for each answer) on the Multiple-Choice Question Creation Page. Aside from the questions, answers and explanations, the author must indicate which is (are) the correct answer(s) for each question, and which page this set of questions is for.

3.10 Electronic Mail

An electronic mail facility can be added to a course allowing one-to-one message transfer among course participants. While this tool currently only supports communication within course boundaries, we plan to connect this tool with Internet-delivered mail.

3.11 Page Annotation Facility

The course-author can add a button to any page of notes which, when clicked by a student, allow that student to make personal annotations for that page of notes. The annotations created are private to that student and persist as long as the student has an account for that course.

3.12 Tool Page

The course-author can create a Tool page (see Figure 9) that can be accessed from any page of notes. This page can be used to place links to course tools that the course-author would like to make available to the course, but would not like to have a button for on every page of notes. The tool page also shows a list of pages recently visited by the student in order that they may re-visit those pages with a single click should they need to refer back.

Figure 9: An Example Tool Page

3.13 Searchable Image Database

The course-author can download images to be included in the course. Web-CT provides a page that allows the association of names and keywords with each image. Students can search for images based on the name and keywords. Search results are presented in the form of a page containing thumbnail-sized versions of the matching images (the thumbnail versions are generated automatically by Web-CT). Clicking on any of the thumbnails presents the corresponding full image.

3.14 Generic Tool

Web-CT provides the ability to place on any page a button-bar icon that is a link to an arbitrary URL. Web-CT provides a large database of icons that can be selected for placement. This allows arbitrary links to audio, images, or other documents. If the course-author prefers, links can, of course, be placed directly in the notes rather than on the button bar. One common use for this is a button linked to a goals statement for each page of notes indicating the learning objectives for that page. A second common use is a button linked to a set of supplementary examples that illustrate the concepts presented on that page.

3.15 Administration

Once a course is set up, it is administered using the Course Administration Page. This allows functions such as the addition and deletion of student accounts, and the creation and administration of quizzes. There is also a Web-CT Administration Page that allows the Web-CT site administrator to create accounts for course-authors.

4. Summary of Web-CT Implementation

Web-CT consists of a large set of CGIs and forms. The CGI programs are all written in Perl or C. The forms are presented to the course-author enabling him or her to design course layout, pages and tool inclusion. When a course-author includes tools in a course, defines ordering of pages, indicates defaults, or defines specific attributes that are to be included in a page of notes, a set of course-configuration files are created or modified. For some aspects of Web-CT a new file will be created for each HTML file entered by the course-author. For others, a central file for the whole course is updated.

For example, if the course-author defines a set of multiple-choice questions that are to be associated with a page of notes, a file is created by Web-CT containing these questions. The file is named by Web-CT to indicate its relationship with that page of notes. As another example, when a default background for every page of notes is selected, the course configuration file for that course is updated to reflect that preference.

Each course has a directory on the server into which is put all of the HTML, text, image or audio files created by, or downloaded by the course author. These files are never modified by Web-CT. When the student views a page of notes, Web-CT reads the page of notes from that directory, and then reads any associated Web-CT files for that page and for the course. According to the content of all these files, Web-CT dynamically generates the HTML required to produce the finished student-view of that page of notes, complete with default page attributes, button bar and glossary links.

Another possible approach would have been to modify the HTML entered by the course-author to include the button-bar, page attributes and glossary links. This would have made it possible to serve the page to a student without first sending it through a Perl script. The advantage of our scheme is that we can leave the original HTML intact as entered by the course-author. If the author decides to later re-edit the HTML, he or she will be presented with exactly the same page that was previously entered. No extra markup will have been done. It is our feeling that this avoids a lot of potential confusion for the course-author.

5. Conclusion

The current state is that Web-CT is 80% implemented. All that remains are some of the overall configuration scripts, and some parts of several tools. In a sense, though, Web-CT will never be complete, as we are constantly think of, and receiving suggestions for, new tools. We expect to begin using Web-CT for the creation of courses before the summer, with delivery of these courses beginning September. Already there has been a great deal of interest within our department, outside Computer Science, and from other institutions. It is our hope that this will be a popular environment for its ease of use and its useful course tools. We also feel that it is a positive step that will further the availability of Web-based courses and course material. We look forward to presenting our experience with Web-CT at a later date.

6. Future Work

Ongoing work is proceeding on several fronts.

We will shortly begin a rewrite of many of our existing tools to take advantage of Java [6]. Java is becoming more widely supported, and we feel it will soon reach the point where most users will have access to browsers that support it. Java will allow us to enhance our current interface by improving the speed and nature of interaction. It will also allow us to implement new tools that would have been difficult with forms and CGIs (our first example of this will be a clickable bitmap editor similar to mapedit [7]).

Additional work will focus on exploring possibilities for new tools with a view toward implementing them for Web-CT. Examples include shared workspaces for student collaboration, real-time audio conferencing, and real-time video conferencing. Where feasible, we will consider the possibility of integrating existing packages into Web-CT rather than implementing all new tools ourselves.

Finally, we will be actively collecting reviews of Web-CT both from course-authors and students using the produced courses. This is the only way we can be sure we are meeting the needs of users in our educational community.

References

[1] Murray W. Goldberg, "CALOS: An Experiment with Computer-Aided Learning for Operating Systems," To appear in Proceedings of the 1996 SIGCSE Technical Symposium, February, 1996.

[2] Murray W. Goldberg, "CALOS: First Results From an Experiment in Computer-Aided Learning", http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/papers/calos-res.

[3] B. Ibrahim, S. Franklin, "Advanced Educational Uses of the World-Wide Web," Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 27 (1995) 871-877.

[4] D. Dimitroyannis, "Virtual Classroom: A Case Study," http://www1.cern.ch/PapersWWW94/ddimitri.ps

[5] Introduction to Object Oriented Programming Using C++, http://info.desy.de/gna/html/cc/index.html

[6] The Java Language Environment: A White Paper, http://java.sun.com/whitePaper/javawhitepaper_1.html

[7] Mapedit: WWW Imagemap Editing Software, http://www.boutell.com/mapedit

About the authors

Murray W. Goldberg is an instructor in the department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. His initial interests were in the areas of operating systems and high speed communication protocols. Currently Murray is working in the area of educational technologies and in particular web-based course authoring of the Web.

Sasan Salari has Bachelor of Science degrees in Microbiology and Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. He has been involved with World Wide Web presentation of educational materials since January 1995. His main focus is combining interactivity and multimedia with traditional WWW presentation in order to enhance student interest and participation.

Paul Swoboda
No biographical information available.