A Gradual Process for Integrating E-learning in a Higher Education Institute © Igor Kanovsky & Rachel “The New Educational Benefits of ICT in Higher Education”, Rotterdam, September Igor Kanovsky, Rachel Or-Bach Emek Yezreel College, Israel

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September The goal is to find a way for ICT utilization that enables the teachers to: 1.Separate content from presentation and concentrate on content. 2.Incrementally develop learning materials (LM) and implement easily at each stage. 3.Reuse any LM they have already prepared. 4.Reuse LM prepared by other teachers.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September Ways to go… e-learning delivery system (WebCT, BlackBoard, HighLearn etc.) authoring tools (ToolBook, Authorware etc.) Disadvantages: poor CBT benefits poor LM reusability Disadvantages: time to learn time to develop poor LM reusability

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September XML. What is it? eXtensible Markup Language (a tag language ) designed to describe data XML tags are not predefined <lecture from=“OOP with Java” number=“3” lastModified=“12/12/2001” > Class and Object.Inheritance. Object. An instance of class. Class for 2D points. Class of Line and Rectangle. …

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September XML. What does it enable? Extensibility, to define new tags as needed. Structure, to model data to any level of complexity. Validation, to check data for structural correctness. Media independence, to publish content in multiple formats. Vendor and platform independence, to process any conforming document using standard software.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September XML. Who define a set of tags? A standard: IMS: the Instructional Management Systems Project ( IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee ( Ariadne: Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe ( The teachers: We want the teachers to use their own tags and maybe get some consensus among themselves on some sets of tags. A higher education teacher has already some viewpoint on the subject matter he teaches. A teacher usually has some teaching materials he had already used.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September The incremental process The main problem: a teacher without technological knowledge has to produce XML & has to reuse his own learning materials No technological problem A teacher can prepare an XML file for his course, using whatever learning material (LM) he had prepared before.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September Starting bundle The basic guidelines include the following:  Introduction to XML.  An editor and instructions for writing XML documents.  Explanation of the use of "namespace" and the requirement of distinguishing between tags of pedagogical meaning (such as lesson, exercise) and tags related to the topic to be taught.  A dictionary of tags that are mandatory.  A common dictionary of tags that can be used.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September The tasks a teacher performs

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September The technical support team composed of experts in ICT graphics and interface design instructional design the technical team should look carefully into the "dictionaries" of the individual teachers, check for parallel notions and initiate meaning negotiation processes between teachers for tags reuse

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September XSL. eXtensible Stylesheet Language The XSL stylesheets are applied to the XML content files for presentation, which can be viewed using any web browser without special plug-ins. Courses (IK Personal Site) …

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September XSL Reusability Mechanism for incremental development by a teacher. Once XSL file has been created, the teacher can present new LM in the same way without the technical team involvement.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September LM Reusability with XSL Mechanism for Learning Materials reuse One XML file with different XSL files can present different part of LM in different ways.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September Shared Dictionary development Tags Description – documents for teachers use that describe the mandatory tags and common dictionary tags. XML Schema – technical description of valid XML documents by use of special standard language for processing by software.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September Advantages of our approach Teachers can concentrate on content without worrying about style and formatting. Teachers can reuse learning materials. Content modules can be used in other contexts (e.g. in related courses, for different skill levels). All XML based materials are well structured and ready for further processing by various software. Indexes, summaries, glossaries etc. can be generated automatically.

Igor Kanovsky & Rachel ICT in Highter Education, Rotterdam, September Thank you. We are looking for partners. The aim is creating (or joining) a consortium which develops and implements approaches like this one. Including proper software development. For contacts: igor kanovsky,