About these Web Pages

The Purpose

The brief for these pages was to summarise the themes or issues in the Special Issue that are most relevant to the design and implementation of Web-based teaching and learning.   I have chosen to do this from the perspective of a university teacher whose institution has decided to implement a e-Learning system and who will want to know what can be learned from previous experience in other institutions.  There are a lot of us out there.

Page Design, Usability & Accessibility

Content

I have assumed that an audience of busy university teachers will want 

• a very quick overview of some current thinking and research on the  subject, i.e. the guided tour rather than an interactive site (see Schaller & Bunnell, 2002) 
• an indication of alternative viewpoints with online hyperlinks for rapid exploration.
• a choice of routes through the materials (sequential, hyperlinked menu, two site maps)
• an emphasis on text rather than graphics in the page design.

The constraint of 10 pages has meant exercising considerable ruthlessness in selection of both the breadth and depth of topics included.  Any future development would include additional questions, such as "Where will I find the time to do all this?", "How can I assess students online?" and "How can I be sure online students aren't cheating?".   I would also add a bibliography page.

Web Style

I have consulted the Yale Web Style Guide, Usability News and the W3C Accessibility Guidelines, i.e.

• CSS has been used for formatting and the pages have been tested in both IE and Netscape and also with the CSS formatting removed (i.e. if accessed by old or non-standard browsers).
• Fluid two column layout (table widths set in percentages rather than pixels).
• Font size reduced by a percentage so it can be easily increased or decreased by the user.
• Alt tags have been added to graphics.

Future Changes would include adding a search facility and a discussion board.  Web page design is always a matter of trade-offs and I am not entirely happy with the way I have used the default settings for internal and external hyperlinks.  A means of signaling external links would be useful but currently there is no  way of so doing which doesn't involve other disadvantages.  

This page is Bobby approved:|