Project Number 09 – 1993

HyperCourseWare
A metaphorical infrastructure for the objects of
education on a distributed network

Project Number 09 – 1993

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to provide a software infrastructure to support educational concepts in the electronic classroom and across a computer network while maintaining the same metaphorical concepts developed in traditional education. For example, courses are generally built around a set of educational objectives that map into objects such as a course syllabus, lecture notes, readings, and assignments. Educational assessment and administrative functions map into objects such as exams, class rolls, and grades. Finally, classroom dynamics map into objects for seating charts, exchange and polling of ideas, sharing of collaborative results, and group feedback.

HyperCourseware as a prototype consists of a set of interlocking modules that represent the typical objects and materials of classroom instruction. Each module is written in a stackware application (e.g., Spinnaker Plus*). The modules are generic in form and applicable to any course taught in an electronic classroom with networked workstations (e.g., the AT&T Teaching Theater) and are adapted by the instructor to the specific course. The home stack provides access to all of the course materials, logs the students onto the system, and provides course information and access to communication and discussion tools. In the syllabus stack course material is organized around a list of dates, topics, readings, and assignments. By selecting a topic, one goes to the associated lecture material. The bulk of the course material is contained in the lecture stacks. One might have text and graphics used during a lecture as well as simulations and exercises. Lecture stacks open with an index of materials to be covered. The exam stack controls the creation of exams and the subsequent taking and grading of them. Grades go into the grade stack (automatically for objective tests and as entered by the instructor for written exams) and are disseminated to the students. Information about the students and the instructor is contained in the class roll. Students enter their own biographical sketch along with a digitized picture of themselves.

HyperCourseware supports both in class (lecture presentation, note taking, etc.) and out of class (studying, homework, reading) activities and can be generalized to distal teaching.

HyperCourseware provides the front-end, in-the-classroom interface for educational information. The hypermedia structure supplied by HyperCourseware is used to shield the instructor and student from the unnecessary burden of having to understand file servers, local area networks, and Internet itself. Although a tremendous amount of information (both text and graphics) is transmitted among students and between the instructor and the students, the transmission is invisible to the users. It merely goes from one screen to another.

HyperCourseware is an elegant approach in that it is highly graphic and semantically rich, yet requires only simple file or network communications. The key to HyperCourseware is has been to build rich on-the-screen metaphorical objects that send information across the network behind the scenes.

As more and more HyperCourseware modules are disseminated and running on the network they will be able to provide an exchange of education material and dialogue that will be accessible in the metaphorical context of education rather than the format of Internet E-Mail of FTP communications.

Audio-visual requirements

Two high resolution (SVGA) projectors and at least two 486 machines on a common server.