Highly Interactive Web Courseware

The grand vision of educational software is that of a networked system enabling the learner to explore, discover, and construct subject matters and communicate problems and ideas with other community members. Educational material is transformed into reusable learning objects, created collaboratively by developers, educators, and designers, preserved in a digital library, and utilized, adapted, and evolved by educators and learners. Recent advances in learning technology specified reusability and interoperability in Web-based courseware. However, great interactivity is not yet considered. Each interactive learning object represents an autonomous hypermedia entity, laborious to create, impossible to interlink and to adapt in a graduated manner, and hard to specify. Dynamic attributes, the look and feel, and functionality are predefined. This work designs and realizes learning technology for Web-based courseware with special regard to highly interactive learning objects. The innovative aspect initially lies in the multi-level, component-based technology providing a graduated structuring. Components range from complex learning objects to toolkits to primitive components and scripts. Secondly, the proposed methodologies extend community support in Web-based courseware – collaboration and personalization – to the software layer. Components become linkable hypermedia objects and part of the courseware repository, rated, annotated, and modified by all community members. In addition to a detailed description of technology and design patterns for interactive learning objects and matching Web-based courseware, the thesis clarifies the denotation of interactivity in educational software formulating combined levels of technological and symbolical interactivity, and deduces a visual scripting metaphor for transporting functionality. Further, it reviews the evolution of hypermedia and educational software to extract substantial techniques for interactive Web-based courseware. The proposed framework supports multilingual, alternative content, provides link consistency and easy maintenance, and includes state-driven online wizards also for interactive content. The impact of great interactivity in educational software is illustrated with courseware in the Computer Graphics domain.