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

1 Introduction
1.1 Aim of project
1 INTRODUCTION
The current situation in World Wide Web (WWW) based education is that ed-
ucational material is created and authored by a small group of experts [1]. In
addition to their educational background, these experts have the technical com-
puting abilities to implement the educational content for delivery via the WWW
[2][1]. The educational content itself is not only built on lecture notes but uses all
the functionality of hypermedia.
At the beginning of the 21st century this situation is not satisfactory. The polit-
ical, cultural, commercial and general community are focusing more and more
on the Internet. It cannot be denied that the WWW will form and influence the
future of mankind in almost every area of our daily life. Therefore, it seems il-
logical that only a small group of experts is producing good educational material
only because they have a technical knowledge advantage over teachers without a
technical background. This seems even more disturbing if it is taken into consid-
eration that a teacher or an educational expert usually has several years of practical
teaching experience, but cannot apply the knowledge gained from this experience
on teaching via the WWW.
The question that results is: Is it feasible to separate the technical tasks in web
based educational authoring from the educational tasks in such a way that a teacher
or educational expert is capable of producing educational material mainly based
on his educational expertise? The answer to this question is regarded as an aim of
this research work and is given in chapter 8.
1.2 Justification
The authoring of "good" educational material is a difficult task. Even more dif-
ficult is the authoring of educational material for the WWW. This is a massive
hindrance to the further development of educational hypermedia. The question is
why the authoring is so difficult.
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