People

Students and course administrators have personal course home pages using forms

No need to know HTML

Allows students and teacher to get to know each other better.

students are registered into the course by the course administrator

course is secure to those registered

students sign-on with their E-mail address

E-mail from Netscape is simply a matter of clicking their name

Students each have their own directory space on the server, which can be managed from their home page. Students can upload GIF, DOC, PPT, INS, ZIP, or SIT files to the server without additional software

file transfer is easily accomplished using a browse and send feature

files are deleted or renamed without having to know UNIX

A custom built Simple Markup Language is used to add links, display pictures or create ordered or unordered lists.

HTML features are available without having to know HTML or have additional software

Groups Clusters and Locations

Student participants can be assigned to groups for

group work and ease of communication. Groups can be assigned to clusters, and clusters can be assigned to locations to make distance course management easier

No special list serve software is needed to mail to selected groups. clusters or locations. The selection feature is available to the students as well as the course administrator.

Articles

On-line database (in the form of HTML documents), can be grouped by category. Categories could be weeks (time) or subjects

Makes it easy for student to look at a subset of the total article database.

Course articles can only be uploaded by the course administrator

Preserves the security of the course materials.

Each article has a unique identifier, which is also a directory on the server.

Keeps HTML documents and pictures for the same article together.

The article directories and other descriptive data are entered using forms. Articles are uploaded from the administrator's home page.

Course administrator does not need to know UNIX commands to construct course materials

Students can respond to articles using forms. The student's response is posted for the other students to read.

Student has to actively process the course materials to submit responses.

The Articles selection features a search engine that will search for a given word in all of the articles in the data base returning a clickable list of the articles that contain that term

Very useful for finding articles covering a particular concept or principle.

Articles may be printed

Printed as document output from the browser

Response links can be made for soliciting student responses to documents that are not on line.

A simple HTML notice to the student can tell them to read a chapter in the text, and the responses can still be submitted and posted on line.

Resources

Resource option provides links to other web sites and documents that the course administrator uploads for all the students in the course

Course resources has its own directory on the server, documents and binary files (including programs) can be uploaded to this directory for the student to download.

The resources database is developed using a simple text processor and Simple Mark-up Language.

Allows the course administrator to produce an indexed set of resources that will meet heir own needs.

Reports

HTML reports can be generated using configurable forms. These documents can contain links, by using simple mark-up language, to documents of files uploaded into the student's personal directory.

A hyperlink capability allows the student to put links back to course articles or to the concept glossary.

Presently there are two report generators built into Construe.

This allows each student to produce a web site for the members of the class. We treat this like an electronic portfolio. The reports are published for the class, and a search engine allows the reports to be searched by topic, or by any text string that might be contained within them.

Course Management

Hyperlinks to a student's work appear beside his or her name in the "people listing" this makes it easy for an instructor to see who is and isn't doing their work. A similar link appears beside group assignments for the concept definitions

Course administration is usually overlooked on web based courses. This makes it possible to catch problems before they go too far.

Instruction

Construe has a number of cognitive strategies embedded within the forms used in the original T4T course.

Advantage: In order to be effective, the web is going to have to be designed to bean effective learning environment.

Concepts

Construe provides for a set of concepts that may be defined by the course administrator or by the students. We have the students share the task of creating the glossary. The final exam test individual student's understanding of the concepts.

Another feature allows the student to paste the context of the text containing the concept along with the definition.

The notion of a community of scholars talking a common language was the impetus for creating the hyper-glossary. Students in a group can edit each other's work.

New Features

features we wish to add to construe include:

User configurable menu bar and forms containing default text.

Allows administrator to customize forms to fit their needs

Group work space - for collaborative group projects

I envision something like reports, except that any member of a group can work on the report. One problem here is what might happen if two members decide to work on the report at the same time from two different computers.

Data collection forms

Administrator or student created forms for collecting data, which can be collected in a data file. Presently this can be done with a third-party program called net-forms.

More hooks - to allow expanded features to be embedded into Construe.

Presently anything that can be done from an HTML form can be done within Construe.

However, some potential users would like to see chat rooms, white boards and video-conferencing features. While nice, these features are not yet practical for many potential users.

Advantages - allows more variety in instructional formats.

We are experimenting with Macromedia's shock-wave for Authorware, which allows CBI tutorials to be delivered over the internet. These tutorials can be launched from within Construe. We don't yet know how student performance data can be stored.

Net-phone is another option we would like to explore

Levels of control - presently there are two levels of control: admin, and other. Admin. Has a course creation capability as well as course development and management capabilities.

The functions of each level have to be better defined and implemented