Details concerning the distribution of teaching materials will be presented in the next lesson. This is only an overview.
Using the World Wide Web means putting the teaching material on your local Web server. This server will usually be found locally where you work. Distance learning students must connect to this Web server to download the teaching material. For the distance learning student this Web server is a "remote" server.
In principle, however, there is no difference whether a server is "remote" or "near" as long as you have to connect to the Internet anyway. When you have connected to the Internet any computer/server may be reached in the same way without additional expenses.
There are two methods that lend themselves to the Web and distance teaching:
Both of these are examined in the sections below. More details on these subjects will be supplied in the next lesson.
HTML is the name of the "language" used to create Web documents. This is regular text with added codes called HTML codes. These codes give headlines, paragraphs, bullet lists, images, graphics, lines etc. in Web documents.
A Web document is read using a Web browser (for example Netscape) to download the HTML document from a Web server and render it onscreen as a formatted document with headlines, graphics, images etc.
Distance teaching students may read the document directly off their monitors or they may print it on paper with images, graphics and everything included.
It is essential to attempt to retain the text as a single document, and not be tempted to create large numbers of hyperlinks. Using only one document is much easier for the student to handle, especially when printing to a printer.
You may distribute lessons both as HTML documents and as Word documents.
Today the creation of HTML documents is easy. All you have to do is write the document using Word in the normal way, and then store it as an HTML document. Hence you can do everything from Word.
Moreover, you must be able to connect HTML documents via hyperlinks enabling jumping from one document to another merely by clicking on a marked word in the text.
Creating HTML documents with Word requires an add-in, Word Internet Assistant, which may be installed along with Word. The addition is free, and can be downloaded via the Internet. Word Internet Assistant requires Word version 6.0c or later versions.
But it is easy to do.
We may link attachments to news articles too (in the same way as for e-mail). These attachments are immediately distributed to the appropriate news servers. This enables participating students from Stord to download the lesson from their local news server at Stord, while Trondheim students download from HiST's news server in Trondheim.
The news system always distributes the message to all subscribing news servers for the newsgroup in question, and you will always be connected to the nearest news server.
However, some aspects of using news for lesson distribution may be open to discussion: message life, read messages vanish, posting of the wrong lesson, lessons with errors etc.
The original idea behind the news system was discussion groups, and in that sense it is excellent for messages, questions, answers, discussions etc. for distance teaching students. It enables some sort of "classroom discussion" on the net.
Using news it is easy to track long discussion threads from the original message via all follow-up messages written by all persons who take part in the discussion.
Another matter is whether the student actually will utilise this medium, whether her or she will dare "to take the plunge". We will discuss this in the next lesson.
Always remember that news discussions basically are public property. Anybody who wants may subscribe to a newsgroup and read or write messages.
7.2 Distribution Lists (Mailing Lists)
This is an alternative to news if there is a desire to keep the discussions within a closed group inaccessible to outsiders. These discussions are held via e-mail, and all discussion participants receive messages via e-mail.
E-mail using attachments is the only alternative here. One problem that might arise is that there might be different formats for the attachments. The standard which must be used is the Internet standard MIME, which specifies the coding of attachments.
This extremely important topic will be examined in lesson 4.
We are most often teaching several hundred students with widely different backgrounds and divergent experience from academic institutions. At times we may be guilty of taking some things for granted, as for example the fact that the students must sign up for exams, which people tend to forget after being out of the academic system for ten or twelve years.
Such things as well-structured information in suitable portions, and second helpings to those who need more are thus essential.