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

2.6 Teaching and learning strategies 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.6 Teaching and learning strategies
Over the last few years, there has been increasing growth of hypermedia informa-
tion bases available over services such as the WWW [1]. Senac et al. argue that
the contribution in terms of openness, accessibility, extensibility and portability
of the WWW make it a good choice for the design of global hypermedia appli-
cations [89]. However, global hypermedia applications are difficult to build and
it is important to create tools that allow them to be constructed efficiently. Kor-
cuska points out that altough generic authoring tools have allowed people without
extensive technical training to create software, they have not provided much help
with creating educationally effective software [90]. Furthermore, Walker and Hess
state that if someone can teach, it is not necessarily the case that this person can
become a competent developer or, perhaps even more importantly, will want to
become a competent developer [2].
Therefore, we suggest the separation of the knowledge based content, e.g. teach-
ing strategy and expertise of the teacher, from the technical one, e.g. programming
languages and distribution medium. The result should be an improvement in the
authoring field of educational hypermedia over the WWW (cf. section 3.1). A
part of this improvement should be provided by the semi-automated production of
educational hypermedia as described by Bultermann and Hardmann [91].
Four different TLSs have been selected as an initial basis for this PhD project:
Question and Answer (cf. section 2.6.4), Lecturing (cf. section 2.6.5), Case Study
(cf. section 2.6.6) and Problem-Solving (cf. section 2.6.7).
2.6.1 Problems
As Elliott states, most teaching staff can use word processing packages and, per-
haps, a drawing package, but would stall at the challenge of progressing to more
complex software packages [28]. He argues that there is a lack of adequate Hyper-
media Authoring Tools especially designed for teachers. This raises the question
of how to create such a tool to simplify the task of authoring for the teachers. To
answer this question, we will try to separate the knowledge based content pro-
vided by the teacher from the technical content. Ideally, the technical content or
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