Although the designed courses are suit well for self-study, interaction between distant learners and teachers is very important. In the future the distant students may enrol the open university by filling out an on- line WWW-form. In studying the material they might have problems with the lectures and the exercises and they would like to ask for advise or help. The final examination needs to be organized and the results should be sent to the students. The designed hypermedia environment supports student - teacher interaction on several levels. For each hypermedia course abulletin board will be set up. The bulletin board is in fact an usenet newsgroup and it is visible to every student. In the front page of the WWW course they find a button to open the bulletin board. Students may also contact the teacher in a more personal way. At the end of each page of the hypernotes they may find buttons to send e-mail to the teacher. This feature will be used to give the students personal assistance, to receive their solutions to given problems and to give them personal feedback. The possibility of attaching documents with e-mail is especially useful, since it allows the sender to point out details on the WWW material.
In addition to e-mail connections and bulletin boards the students and their teacher can also use videoconferencing software for their meetings and discussions. With ShowMe on Sun [Sun 1995] and CU- SeeMe [CU-SeeMe 1995] on Macintosh and PC it is possible to establish real-time videolinks. It is not possible to open a videolink from a HTML document to a specific address automatically. Currently, the videolinks have to be opened manually by launching the videoconferencing software and entering the information needed to es- tablish a connection to the teacher. However, the developers of CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software are planning to create an URL specification to open a videolink using HTML.
ShowMe includes audio, shared applications, video and whiteboard. It uses TCP/IP-protocol and supports Ethernet and ATM. With the Ethernet maximal speed of 10 Mbit/s picture refresh rate may be low and voice may be cropped. The available ATM-connections allow speeds of up to 155 Mb/s, so that the quality of video and audio is better. Audio provides 8-bit 8 KHz at 64 Kbps. Audio traffic can be multi- or one-way. Shared Application works with X11-compliant applications. A user can start applications that the other users can see and use. Applications run in the local computer and only send display to other participants screens. Video lets the users see all the participants and take images from participants video-windows. The quality of the video is not yet sufficiently good to show teaching with e.g. chalk and blackboard. Text and pictures can also be shown using special shared application called Whiteboard. Participants can see the Whiteboard and write or draw messages on it.
Conclusions
In this paper a hypermedia based learning environment, i.e. a microworld, which supports self-studying and distance learning on the WWW has been presented. Technical aspects in converting linear text in popular formats (RTF, LaTeX) into HTML have been discussed. The main components of the environment are automatically linked hypertext, a database of definitions, exercises and examples with hints and interactive exercises where an on-line computer algebra system is used to generate and randomise the problems and to check the answers. Interaction between the teacher and the distant learners will be supported by bulletin boards, e-mail and finally with videoconferencing software. An experimental group of distance learners will be set up to test the proposed learning environment both from the technical and the educational point of view.
References
[Antchev et al. 1995a] Antchev K., Luhtalahti M., Suomela K., Pohjolainen S. (1995). Conic Sections. Available at http://matwww.ee.tut.fi/cgi-bin/ConicSections.
[Antchev et al. 1995b] Antchev K., Multisilta J., Pohjolainen S. (1995). Mathematica as Part of a Hypermedia Learning Environment. International Mathematica Symposium,, 1995, Southampton, UK. 21-28.
[CU-SeeMe 1995] The CU-SeeMe Project. (1995). Available at http://CU-SeeMe.cornell.edu/
[Drakos 1994] Drakos N. (1994). From Text to Hypertext: A Post-Hoc Rationalisation of LaTeX2HTML. First International Conference of the World-Wide-Web, 1994, CERN, Geneva. Available at http://cbl.leeds.ac.uk/nikos/doc/www94/ www94.html
[Chris 1995] Hector Chris. (1995). RTFtoHTML 2.7.5 Converter for Macintosh. Available at ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ Mosaic/Mac/Related/rtf-to-html-converter-275.hqx.
[Multisilta et al. 1994a] Multisilta J., Pohjolainen S. (1994). Using Hypermedia in Teaching Linear Algebra. In John G. Lewis (ed.): Proc. of the fifth SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra, Philadelphia.
[Multisilta et al. 1994b] Multisilta J., Pohjolainen S. (1994). Implementation of Authoring Tools for Hypermedia Based Learning Environments in Mathematics. Proceedings of CALISCE 1994, Paris, France. Available at http://matwww. ee.tut.fi/Docs/paris/paris.html.
[Pohjolainen et al. 1994] Pohjolainen S., Multisilta J., Antchev K. (1994). Hypermedia Learning Environment for Mathematics. Human Interactions on Symbolic Computation, Workshop, RIACA, Amsterdam 10-11.3.1994. [Cdrom 1994] Source Code Cdrom. (1994). Walnut Creek CDROM, 1547 Palos Verdes Mall, Suite 260, Walnut Creek CA
94596 USA. email: [email protected].
[Sun 1995] Sun Microsystems. (1995). ShowMe Product Overview. Available at http://www.sun.com/cgi-bin/show? products-n-solutions/sw/ShowMe/index. html.
[Wolfram 1992] Wolfram Research. (1992). MathLink Reference Guide, Technical Report. Wolfram Research Inc. [Wolfram 1988] Wolfram S. (1988). Mathematica™: A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer. Addison-Wesley.