Distance learning with the World-Wide Web

This paper appeared in the proceedings of the International Conference on "Open and Distance Learning - Critical success Factors", Geneva, 10-12 October, 1994, published by FIM,Erlangen, pp 123-126, ISBN 3-8229-9930-X.

A Postscript version of this document is available

Summary:

Conference theme: Dissemination of Information
Learning Sector: Higher Education
Keywords: Access, Distance Learning, Hypertext/ Hypermedia, Tele-Teaching.

What is the World-Wide Web?

The most common configuration is for an information provider to run one of the public domain HTTP servers available for all sorts of platforms, and for an information consumer to run one of the public domain HTML viewers, among which Mosaic is probably the most well known because of its multimedia features. The most important features of WWW are:

• The integration of most widespread Internet protocols, allowing the user to have access to almost all existing resources available on the Internet in an integrated fashion.
• A uniform naming scheme for Internet resources, the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), consisting of various fields: protocol_name:// Internet_address_of_server_host/path where "path" is either the full path of a document in the server storage space, or a query to a database server, or some information allowing the server to locate unambiguously a resource it has access to.
• Easy interfacing with external viewers. The documents are indeed typed and different viewing programs can be associated to the various types (the most common scheme is to infer the type of the document from the suffix of the file name). New types can even be defined, with appropriate viewers if necessary. When the user follows a link that points to a document which requires an external viewer, the WWW viewer (for instance Mosaic) retrieves that document and launches the corresponding viewer to handle it. The advantage of this approach is that it is very easily extendible, but its drawback is that those documents that require an external viewer are outside the hyperstructure, that is, they cannot hold links to other documents.
• Handling of hypermedia documents, since the HTML language allows for the integration, in a single document, of text, pictures and icons, which can all bear links to other documents via embedded URL references. There are some limitations, though, as video animations and sounds are handled by external viewers. There is thus no synchronization possible between an HTML document and video animations or sounds.
• High portability, since HTML documents are in a simple and machine-independent format. Each HTML viewer can display the documents according to its capabilities and those of the machine it is running on. However, there is presently very little portability when it comes to video animation or sound, as very different formats are used in the various computers available on the market. Platform independent standards are starting to emerge, like the MPEG format for video animations, for instance, but they often involve some limitation, like requiring a color display.

Why is WWW so successful?

• The Internet growth itself. More than two million hosts are connected to it, representing an estimate of more than twenty million users. It has probably reached a critical mass in which almost anybody can find something of interest.
• The transparent access to all commonly available Internet resources, giving access to a gigantic universe of electronic information, with the added appeal of hypermedia, making it trivial for anybody to do "net- surfing". The ease of use is certainly a very important factor for widespread acceptance.
• The availability, in the public domain, of both server and viewer software on multiple platforms. The ease of installation of the server software is probably a key factor to the increasing amount of documents available all over the world.
• The relative simplicity of the HTML syntax. Thanks to this simplicity, information providers do not need sophisticated tools to prepare their documents.

Distance learning with WWW

These pedagogical uses have, on one hand, limitations in what they can attempt to do, compared to educational software that runs on stand-alone machines, because of the current limitations of the HTTP protocol and of the HTML syntax. For instance, current educational material available through WWW makes only use of the hypertextual capabilities of the medium, allowing the learner to navigate through documents without much feedback from the system [3][4]. But, on the other hand, pedagogical uses of WWW give the unique opportunity to use the ocean of information and knowledge that is accessible on the Internet, and that is now available at a fingertip.

More sophisticated uses of the WWW are possible, without much additional effort, to provide much more intelligent tutoring. We have demonstrated, with an actual example [2], how educational programs can be executed remotely through WWW, thus making use of all the interesting features of this tool, i.e. hypermedia and remote access, without giving up on those features that make tutorials "intelligent", i.e. maintain a profile of the user and adapt the behavior of the program to the abilities of the learner.

The basic principle for this sophisticated use is the following (fig 2): some links can cause a WWW server to execute, on the server machine, a program or a shell script which, in turn, can spawn a process that will handle the pedagogical interactions with the distant user. This "child" process will run during the whole instructional session and its output will be sent to the learner's viewer as virtual HTML documents. These virtual documents contain embedded links that include the process-ID of the educational program. They can also contain fields that have to be filled by the user and that will be transmitted back to the instructional program by the WWW client viewer. These virtual documents can, as well, contain links to actual documents anywhere on the Internet, thus giving the learner potential (guided) access to this whole world of information.

References:

1. Bruce R. Schatz, Joseph B. Hardin;
   "NCSA Mosaic and the World Wide Web: Global Hypermedia Protocols for the Internet";
   Science magazine, Vol. 265, 12 August 1994, pp 895-901.

2. Bertrand Ibrahim;
   "World-Wide Algorithm Animation";
   Advance Proceedings of the First World-Wide-Web conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 25-27, 1994, pp 305-316.

3. Marcus Speh, Carter Butts, Colman Reilly, Joseph C. Wang;
   "WWW for the Globewide Network Academy";
   Advance Proceedings of the First World-Wide-Web conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 25-27, 1994, pp 335-346.

4. Dimitri A. Dimitroyannis;
   "Virtual Classroom: A Case Study";
   Advance Proceedings of the First World-Wide-Web conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 25-27, 1994, pp 325-329.

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Bertrand Ibrahim