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

9.2 Future work 9 CONCLUSIONS
of educational material. Since extensibility was one of the main criteria for the
development of the project, the design of the EFTECS and the HEAT will allow
the addition of new EHPs and TLSs without any major problems. The more EHPs
and TLSs are covered within the EFTECS the more flexible and generic it will
become for usage in educational hypermedia.
Four different TLSs have been analysed and implemented within the EFTECS
during the work on this project: Question and Answer (cf. section 3.3.1), Lec-
ture (cf. section 3.3.2), Case Study (cf. section 3.3.3) and Drill and Practice (cf.
section 3.3.4). The experiences gained from the implementation of those TLSs
and the results of the practical and interview evaluations suggest that the imple-
mentation of new TLSs should not be a problem as long as the TLSs and the
EHPs implement the basic EHPs (cf. section 3.4) and the rules designed for the
EFTECS (cf. section 3.8). However, if time had allowed it, it would have been
most interesting to implement more TLSs and their corresponding EHPs.
For example, the creation of a specialised TLS for the creation of educational
material in a software development or code production environment would poten-
tially be very beneficial in a computing science teaching setting.
The creation of additional TLSs should be addressed during future research to
optimise the usability of the HEAT.
9.2.3 Mass conversion of existing material
The conversion of pre-existing material was analysed in detail during the practical
evaluation (cf. section 7.2). The results of the evaluation showed that the manual
conversion of the material is very cumbersome, especially if the author is not an
educational expert in the area.
Another aspect that was problematic within the scope of this PhD was the mass
conversion of existing digital and paper based material. Several small tests were
carried out and produced promising results (cf. chapter 7). However, the complete
conversion of a whole course module for example was out of scope for this PhD.
Nevertheless, the EFTECS implemented within the HEAT would allow such a
conversion, after an addition of further functionalities of the HEAT.
200