Tele Education Essay Research Paper 10 INTRODUCTION — страница 6

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WebStore and a tea-room which participants can visit for informal chats. The lectures are performed by using video/audio conference tools. A system was used to show slides on the participants web-browsers. The self study modules contained web pages with information to read and small built-in exercises. The group exercises consist of a number of questions to be answered by the group and returned to the teacher for correction afterwards. When the teacher has corrected the answers they are discussed in a conference with all the participants. In the first trial a shared editor was introduced for use in group exercises. The shared editor is a tool for synchronous collaboration on smaller texts, and is meant to complement the chat and whiteboard tools used in earlier trials. An

illustration of the new shared editor can be found below. In the second trial, a new floorcontrol-system for use during lectures as well as a complete new graphical design of the virtual learning environment was tested. The floorcontrol system was used by the teacher during lectures, to determine which students wanted to ask a question, and to mute or unmute the microphones and video cameras accordingly. A new graphical design of the User Interface (UI) was introduced, in an attempt to create an even more homogenous UI. The floorplan metaphore was kept, but new images and controls where implemented throughout the environment. 4.1.2 An Introduction to Relational Databases and SQL This course covered the theoretical principles of relational database technology as well as supporting

the hands-on skills of using relational database language (SQL). Students took the course over a three day period, for two hours each day. At the beginning of the course a one hour lecture outlined the objectives of the course and provided an introduction to the topics. The educational content comprised of text, graphics, and animation and was divided into four sections, consisting of a total of twenty one modules (a module typically being 1-5 pages). The course was made available via the Prospect Tele-educational environment. On accessing the course, a separate courseware browser window was opened, called the Virtual Student Desktop (VSD). All student interactions with the courseware are facilitated via this VSD. The Tele-educational environment is also accessible by the student

for conferencing and synchronous interaction. The VSD is rendered as a set of WWW windows, frames, tool bar and icons. All native WWW browser buttons are suppressed (hidden) so as not to distract the user from the main goal of education. A tool bar specially designed for educational use is provided by the VSD at the bottom of the screen. From this tool bar the student is able to contact tutors or fellow students (asynchronously), access external systems, as well as navigate and interact with the educational course material. Figure 3 illustrates a page from a module in the course, and shows the educational toolbar at the bottom of the screen and an index of the topics dealt with by this particular module in the course on the left hand side of the screen. Figure 3 : page from

module in the course Overall the course comprised several different types of information: Administrative (i.e. how to use the course etc.); A database of (self contained) modules; Indexes or Roadmaps of specific courses through various modules; Evaluation Forms and a Case Study. The roadmaps were important as the modules can be combined in several ways to satisfy the different requirements for different student objectives. Each roadmap corresponds to different learning objectives of the RDBMS course. Thus the roadmaps provide a means of re-using existing modules with as little redundancy as possible of educational material and administrative overhead. A significant feature of the system was to provide direct access to a real ?commercial? RDBMS via the same interface as the

educational course. The relational DBMS is seamlessly integrated into the student educational desktop. Thus the tool bar offered by the VSD contains an icon which allows students to issue SQL queries on a live database. The idea of this is to deliberately blur the distinction between the educational environment and the ?target? systems. This encourages students to ?try out? various parts of the course before attempting a larger project. Another feature was the ability of the student to store references to distinct locations in the course material (bookmarks). Traditionally these are stored locally on the student?s machine. However this has disadvantages as students rarely use the same machine all the time. The VSD allows such bookmarks to be stored within the educational service