Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

7.2 Existing material 7 PRACTICAL EVALUATION
Therefore, it would be good if the HEAT allowed the division of a complete course
book into several EMs, e.g. one EM for every chapter of a course book. Unfortu-
nately, at the moment the HEAT supports only one EM at a time.
This also results in very large EMs which become more and more difficult to
manage in the HEAT. Therefore, it seems important to implement the simulta-
neous management of several EMs in the HEAT during future work (cf. section
9.2).
As already mentioned in chapter 6, the linking of the different TLSs in the EM, the
linking of different EMs and the identified problems will be discussed in chapter
8.
7.2.5 Presentation of the material
The presentation of the material after its production for the WWW was functional
and free of errors. The navigation through the created content also worked cor-
rectly, but was fairly straightforward due to the fact that the converted educational
material was based on a book and therefore reflected a book like structure.
However, as it was already identified during the interview evaluation in chapter
6, the graphical presentation of the material is not perfect and will have to be
addressed in future work (cf. section 9.2).
7.2.6 Ease of authoring
From our point of view the conversion of already existing material into the HEAT
was challenging in many respects.
First of all, all the educational material had to be typed in by hand. An electronic
format of the material was available in MS Word format, but the HEAT does not
support the import of external material at the moment. Therefore, it seems very
important to create several import and export interfaces for accepted formats, like
for example MS Word or XML.
Furthermore, the more TLSs were authored and fitted into the EM, the more dif-
ficult it became to identify the specific TLSs. The different TLSs within an EM
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