Both methods are being used in the NITOL project. Recently the Web has really come into its own as an elegant and appropriate distribution method.
Lesson 2 dealt with electronic conferences generally. In this chapter we will examine how this service can be used for distance teaching. The figure below shows how it works. The teacher composes new mail and posts it on the appropriate electronic conference (newsgroup) for this subject. A file (the lesson) is attached to this mail. The mail (with the attachment) is transferred to the news server you are connected to. Eventually this mail will automatically be transferred to all other news servers subscribing to the same electronic conference, for instance the news server for The College of Stord/Haugesund.
The student then reads this mail off his or her nearest news server, and downloads the lesson which is attached to the mail.
The figure above shows how a teacher posts a lesson on the Trondheim news server. This mail is then copied to all other news servers subscribing to the appropriate newsgroup for this subject. The figure shows how students at Hitra and Rissa may connect to the news server in Trondheim and download the lesson. Stord students download from the Stord news server.
The same occurs when a Stord teacher posts mail on a local news server. The mail with the lesson attachment is then transmitted to the other news servers.
Thus there is a constant exchange of mail in the news service so that all news servers carry all the messages/mail. Therefore students may always connect to the nearest news server to download their lessons.
The figure above uses a telephone as the symbol for network transfer. For many students this is the most relevant method as they do not have leased lines, hence the telephone and modem constitute a very reasonable alternative. Students at educational institutions will of course download their lessons via the local area network.
Before utilising the news system for lesson distribution, newsgroups must be established. This is a task for the supervisor who is intimate with the inner workings of the news services. His/her task comprises establishing groups, their distribution area, life span of the messages/articles, cleaning up before new semesters etc.
Posting lessons is performed via a news application (called electronic conference software). This application runs on your local PC. This is where you compose your messages, append attachments, and have them transmitted to your news server. Thereafter the news system takes over, copying the messages to other news sites.
The figure above shows the conference called FLINK as an example. The background window shows two lists: On the right the newsgroups of which you are a member, on the right the news articles held in the newsgroup now selected.
This example demonstrates how to compose a new message. The window on top shows the text written by the teacher to explain what the lesson deals with. The next step is appending the lesson by selecting File/Attachment from the menu. This opens an ordinary Open window, as when you open files in a word processor. Find the file you want in the Open window, select it and click the OK button. The lesson has now been appended as an attachment. Click the Send button, and the news message with the attachment is transmitted to your news server, and from there to all the other appropriate news servers.
Shortly afterwards, students dispersed across the country may retrieve the news article from their own news sites, using the same news application. The only difference is that now Read is selected instead of Write. When you now select File/Attachment, the news application offers you the opportunity to select in which directory you want to store the attachment.
The lesson has now been transferred as an attachment, and it may be read using the appropriate viewer, or sent to your printer. For our purposes, the word processor used will most often be MSWord.
The World Wide Web (hereafter the Web) has recently emerged as a very important competitor for newsgroups, perhaps becoming the preferred medium for distributing teaching material.
In Lesson 2 we considered the Web as a system of documents containing hyperstructures, i.e. sensitive spots, in text and graphics, which will take you to new documents and thus to new information with a simple click of the mouse.
In contrast to the news system there is no automatic transmission of information from one server to another. Web documents must be retrieved from the site where they have been placed. This means that Web documents and lessons posted to HiST/IDB's Web server will stay on this server all the time. All students must collect their lessons from here.
The figure above shows the use of the Web to distribute lessons. A teacher in Trondheim posts Web documents on a local Web server. A Stord student who wants to download this lesson must connect via a server located on Stord (not necessarily a Web server) and from there to the Trondheim Web server.
This is not difficult. All you need to do is start a Web reader, for example Netscape, and then supply the Trondheim Web-server address as well as the directory and filename, and in very short order the Web document will reside on your PC (the actual time used depending, of course, on the amount of heavy graphics and images in the Web document).
It is just the same for the students who use a modem and their telephone. They dial into their Internet provider (usually at local rates), and then they connect to our Web server via Netscape.
When students are using the Web and Netscape, there is nothing to stop them from easily reaching other Web resources anywhere in the world. If you are the teacher, you may, for example "point" to appropriate resources.
The teacher does this by creating separate Web pages holding brief information on the lesson, a pointer to the course lesson itself (which could be a Web document or a Word file), and in addition you may point out other useful Web resources as well as brief information on these.
The entire World Wide Web functions in this way. Documents are stored where they are produced. Users collect these by connecting to the appropriate Web sites. And remember that making this connection is very simple, it is just a matter of clicking on a hyperlink created, perhaps, by the teacher.
More on creating Web documents will be presented in the next chapter.
Below is an example of a simple Web page written in HTML code.
The page may appear to have a plethora of coding, but the majority
of this has to go into any Web page. This page may eventually
be extended adding new headlines, bullet lists, hyperlinks etc.<HEAD><TITLE>Fagplan</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Fagplan</H1><hr>Følgende fag tilbys:
<ul><li>Grunnkurs EDB<li><a href="../fagene/piol/piol.htm">Pedagogikk
i åpen læring</a><li>Prosjektrettet systemarbeid</ul>
<hr><em>7. feb.1996 Geir Maribu</em>
<P>
</BODY></HTML>
Headlines are created by enclosing the text within the codes <Hl> and </Hl>. Bullet lists are produced with <ul>, <li> etc. Advanced editors have also been marketed where such codes are inserted automatically. Word 6.0 has an option enabling a Word document to be converted into an HTML document.
Please also observe the HTML codes enclosing the string Pedagogikk i åpen læring [Pedagogy in Open Learning]. This is a hyperlink which points to another document holding more information on the subject Pedagogics in Open Learning. A click on this text (shown underlined and in blue colour in the window below) takes us directly to this document.
The HTML code above produces the following Netscape document:
