A.C.E.T. Fall Conference
29 September 1995, Dallas, Texas

The Paperless Course

Chris Parr
University of Texas at Dallas

Let no one assume that University students will permit a course to be paperless without a fight.
The comfort of a textbook is too seductive for them to forgo. And the concept of Web Lecture Notes as a substitute for the paper brick version they can tote anywhere is not satisfying. While the single greatest "value added" feature in the minds of students are the instructor's lecture notes (where else are you going to glean his/her emphasis?), the nonuniversal availability of literal notebook computers on most college campuses renders the ubiquity of the textbook even in a paperless course a foregone conclusion.

We can assume that there will soon come a time when (a) no student is without a well-connected notebook tutor which will have (b) evolved to the visual stability and resolution of the printed page. It is only then that the publishers need to worry.

A word of Caution:

None of the links you'll follow in this seminar
have links which will return you back here!
So become quite familiar with the BACK button on
your browser so that you can return to pick up the
thread of this tale however fascinated you become 
with its references.

Courseware Authoring B.W. (before the Web)

Plato (mainframe)

Plato offerred crude graphics and interactive CBT (Computer-Based Testing) in addition to slide-frame metaphor presentations. Although a product of the 70s, Plato survives even to this day in products like Falcon Software's Chemistry modules. While still sporting CGA (low resolution) graphics and 40 column text (but adding relevant video elements), those modules are wildly successful, capturing about 50% of their market share (one half of all freshman chemistry students)!

Presentation Apps (PC)

With the ubiquity of Microsoft applications, most campuses will have PowerPoint site licences on their network servers for faculty to avail themselves of simple presentation authoring. Coupled with laptops and inexpensive overhead projector tablets, PowerPoint and its peers bring slide management to the higher education classroom. Unfortunately, such canned presentations, even if augmented with MTV attention-grabbing devices, only reinforce a passive learning experience. Missing are the serendipitous leaps of imagination to unexpected insights.

It's hard to imagine that technology can be of assistance in that cerebral domain, but hypermedia and the richness and currency of Web information are a significant aid.

Freelance, PowerPoint, etc. (slide metaphor)

Low cost and availability are not the only advantages accruing to presentation managers. Encouraging students to present term projects in such formats makes more palatable the condemnation to public speaking. And persuasion (and the product of the same name!) are not inconsiderable tools to be added to a student's skillkit for use beyond the classroom.

While the slide metaphor implicit in presentation managers encourages pith which in turn encourages organization, slides bind instruction both geometrically and temporally. They may be the database, but they are not the browser, as it were. Given a stable network (don't get anyone started on that), HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the formatter of World Wide Web pages) can replicate all of the worthwhile aspects of presentation managers while avoiding these bounds.

Macromedia's Authorware (Mac & PC multimedia)

The "high price spread" belongs to Macromedia. It's authorware was the first desktop authoring success. Current version 3.0 permits incorporation of Macromedia's presentation manager output ("Director") into authored "Authorware." It has finally permitted free run-time modules of YOUR work to be distributed, a feature which recommended "Toolbook" long ago. Modest CBT (computer-based testing) is also a part of the package.

Asymetrix's Toolbook (multimedia & CBT)

Now in version 3.0, Toolbook has split its authoring from its multimedia applications; so you must specify "Toolbook Multimedia 3.0" if you intend to use sound and video. A third version adds CBT (Computer-Based Testing). This allows one to buy in at whatever level your budget permits. Helpful URL (Uniform Resource Locators) for Toolbook are collected here.

Authoring A.W. (After the Web)

Examples

The Web in Learning

One of the salient features of the authorware applications above is that they all produce a product, a piece of authorware (and the associated "run-time" support) which must be transferred to the end-user's platform in atoms (as Negroponte enjoys calling physical media) rather than electrons (Negroponte's "bits"). That changes on the World Wide Web!

One of the Web's salient features is that there is but one copy of a webcourse in existence (on the author's server), and it is always the most current version. Contemporary browsers take the place of the run-time support, but even that is about to change!

Soon browsers on any Web-capable receiving platform will be able to download true run-time "applets," platform-independent programs to augment the course. The front-runner in this aspect is Java, an application language from Sun Microsystems; it is being adopted left and right for the flexibility of expanding the tool-using power of Web browsing. As this comes to fruition, authors can include, for example, special-purpose simulations in the Web educational experience.

In the meantime, however, there are plenty of opportunities to mine the authorware-like aspects of current Web browsers for pedagogic nuggets. The reference above chronicles some of these.

Digital Technology in Education

One of the most interesting features of this webcourse is that the "lecture notes" are actually web page synopses of the week's readings made by the students themselves. This is, of course, more than mere delegation; it not only serves as an assignment prompting students to dig deeply into the material, but it is also presented from the perspective of those most prone to misinterpret. As light dawns, students can not only record their discoveries but also the misconceptions which would frustrate those discoveries by neophytes.

Researching a Text(!)

Not surprisingly, the World Wide Web is of assistance whether or not one chooses to augment one's class with webnotes. It holds a wealth of contemporary data relating to almost any subject; the two complaints which might be levelled at the Web is that its data is too contemporary and rarely peer-reviewed. The former is to be expected for a source of such youth, but academics will bridle at the "vanity press" aspect of the Web

But when contemporaneous is your goal, the Web obliges as, for example, with the following compendium of publishers world wide.

Rich & Knight's Artificial Intelligence

Although this might be a publisher's fact sheet on this seminal work, it actually comes from another rich source, The Internet Bookshop which has an unfortunate logo: i(nternet)BS. It is, however, a bully market for books, being the Internet's largest source. (Indeed it has won Point's Top 5% of All Web Sites award.)

Of particular interest is the use of hyperlinks to other texts in which you may well be interested having taken the trouble to search out this one!

The Electronic Xerox

Be prepared for the absurd. All the efforts you take to make your course paperless are defeated by your students. In the course whose example appears below, one student proudly presented a 3" stack of the printouts she had produced of every electronic page I published.

Until Web access is universal and connectivity invades all places one might wish to study, more paper, not less, will be the norm for your students. After all, you'd wisely print both sides of hardcopy handouts; students don't.

Technical Impediments & Liberations

Some of the problems of "special language" are being addressed in the next generation of the Web's HyperText Markup Language; in particular, an equation viewer will be incorporated. But even that will not suffice to display all your discipline requires.

Since the invention of the typewriter, we academics have been stoking out typewriter art in approximation to disciplinary symbology. The Web language (HTML) makes this possible here as well by offerring monospaced type. A quick inspection of this sentence will show that each letter takes up its proportional size "m" more and "j" less. But if we are to "draw" symbols spanning many lines, there must be reliable columns as well as rows of text characters. To accomplish this, we must compose in

Preformatted monospaced fonts like this one.
Since all word-wrapping is lost in such preformatted text,
one cannot simply type forever off the right hand side of the page confident that the browser will be able to fix things up for us when the text reaches its reader!

You'd have to use the horizontal scroll bars to see
the end of that runon sentence.  Notice that the
preformatted text is obedient to the indenting of 
this outline while disobedient to the right margin.

     H      O      So, for example, being a
     |     //      chemist, I might compose a
 H   C    C        terribly poor approximation
  \ / \\ / \       to the molecule benzoic acid
   C    C   O-H    as if on a typewriter for
   ||   |          inclusion in some web page.
   C    C
  / \ // \         Surfers would snicker, but
 H   C    H        with only this primitive tool,
     |             a point could still be made.
     H

Scanned Workaround

An obvious alternative is to compose in your most specialized editing tool, humanists in Nota Bene and mathematicians in TeX, perhaps, and print hardcopy as you would do for publication. Then you've but to scan it (or have it scanned...how resource rich are you?) and incorporate the image file into your web page.

The example here is of a quiz utilizing greek letters and super- and sub-scripts unavailable in HTML. The final image was a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) file favored by Web browsers because it is compressed graphical information which can be easily expanded as the browsers download it.

Effortless Handouts

GIF was used to picture this handwritten solution (to the above quiz). It is the image format of choice for simple graphics. GIF is constrained to only 256 colors, but that's more than sufficient for monochrome text!

GIF isn't the Web's only image format. JPEG is better for photographs; it accommodates millions of colors but compresses photographs more thoroughly than does GIF.

So if you've legible handwriting and access to a scanner, notes of all kinds may be added to the Web with absolute minimal effort. And they may contain whatever diagrams or symbology one wishes!

Embedded Equations

When you click on the above, the first image you see is a JPEG file (of a nuclear reactor), but as you scroll down the lecture, gross inserts are seen of formulae and equations. Instead of occupying an entire Web page, they may be inserted into paragraphs as required. You are only limited by the number of graphics supported by your browser, but that limit is struck first using Integrated Symbology below.

Ubiquitous TrueType Symbology

Despair not that special purpose symbols are unavailable. Many are unavoidable! If you use Windows, for example, one of your automatic font choices (no need to purchase it) is Symbol.

Windows' Symbol

Its only disadvantage is that your keyboard keys don't show what symbols will result! This is easily solved. After clicking on the Symbol icon above, click the File menu and from it choose to Save this keyboard GIF image for your later reference.

Although the browsers which run under Windows all know GIF, native Windows does not. However, a freeware program called LView can be downloaded, decompressed (find someone familiar with "ZIP"), and installed to read GIF (and JPEG) files from the Program Manager.

WordPerfect's Math A

And your printer driver or word processor or just about any application you add to Windows will clutter more special-purpose fonts onto your hard drive. Here, for example, is a keyboard map of symbols dear to the hearts of mathematicians which WordPerfect donates for no apparent reason.

Bookshelf's Super-sub-scripts

Even CD references, like Microsoft's Bookshelf, might hide a handful of symbols in your Windows directory. Bear in mind that you can use the Font Manager to track down and expunge any of these to which you resent donating disk space, but then Bookshelf won't work correctly.

This link shows a series of fonts besides Bookshelf's. They've been scanned and posterized as have all the other GIFs; posterization reduces the number of different colors, in this case to only 4 or 5 grays. Notice that this enormous reduction in file size has almost no visible consequences!

Distributed Learning: A World of Resources

And all one needs are addresses. In the Web World, these addresses are called URLs. They are rather like familiar e-mail addresses: hierarchical nodes separated by periods like www.kodak.com which jumps to the Eastman Kodak WWW home page. Since Kodak is a commercial institution, it's suffix is obvious. Schools and universities end in edu, and foreign institutions end in country letters like canada. (Russia is still su, however.)

Fortunately, one needn't memorize these; once found, they can be saved as "bookmarks" by most browsers. They can be found by following trails of links (such as those underlined texts here) or via Web Searchers like America Online's Web Crawler and many, many more.

Periodic Table (HTML map)

A web author can capitalize on the enormous talent and industry which has been lavished onto online resources. For example, this Periodic Table of the Elements comes to us from Berkeley but is so valuable that it has been echoed there from many other sites around the globe. This sounds redundant since a browser should be able to get it from any one site; however, as popular an item as the Period Table (What? You're not a chemist?) would render a unique site location perpetually busy.

You must scroll down to get to the table which is in appropriately tabular form, supported by the HTML web language. Clicking on an atom whisks you to a voluminous database of its properties. It's not hard to see why, as an instructor of Chemistry, I am enamored of this resource and infinitely grateful that it has been so well prepared by others!

Iconized Transporter

This link summons a Freshman Chemistry lecture with iconized illustrations which are themselves links to their source. As your cursor passes over such an image (the first is a molecular electronic orbital), it changes to a pointing finger just as it has done with the text links previously. Clicking on the image jumps the "reader" to, in this case, the University of California at San Diego where the construction of such orbitals can be studied.

Clearly, these "active references" are themselves Web pages with active references to further Web pages etc., etc., and the fear might be that turning students loose on such a wealth of information would cause them to lose time-on-task. Such an worry would argue for the closing of libraries with their sinister synergy of juxtaposed resources on near identical topics (books on shelves in Dewey Decimal order). Yet university students not only survive libraries but probably spend less time than we, as instructors, would like them to spend there!

The decidedly non-academic content of many things webbable is another matter into which we'll not delve here.

Hyperdocument Jumpcode

If you are using Netscape as your browser, its View Source menu choice can be invoked on the previous link to see how the link itself is constructed. But if your browser has no such (terribly tutorial) function, this "Hyperdocument Jumpcode" link shows a screen shot of how that Freshman Chemistry lecture web page was created.

There one sees the beginning of a line of code (stretching beyond the right border) which looks like this (you'll need to scroll right to see it all):

<a href="http://www-wilson.ucsd.edu/education/qm/Molecules.html">stuff</a>

which is the URL link address for Kent Wilson's "molecules" page at UCSD. But the "reader" is spared this nonsense, seeing only instead the active reference picture in its place. That place is where I've put the marker stuff which in the actual code is given as:

<img border=0 alt="" align=right src="sg1sucsd.gif">

whose essence is <img src="sg1sucsd.gif"> identifying "sg1sucsd.gif" as a GIF image file in the page's default directory.

Inelegant, I'll grant you, but not incomprehensible. There's a mad logic at work which will sneak up on you as you begin to author.

The Virtual Hospital

This clicking on pictures can be taken to dizzying heights as parts of pictures can activate one link while other parts activate others! This is an example of such a mapped image in an excellent health-related Web page. Try clicking on some interesting part of the picture; remember to use your BACK button to climb out however deeply this reference leads you!

HyperText Markup Language (+,2,3,?)

As tedious as the hypertext links may be, take heart: it isn't necessary to learn the code! You can produce HTML without writing HTML as the Automation section below suggests.

Primer

However, should this (unnecessary) challenge intrigue you, know that the Web is probably the most heavily self-documented entity in history. There are tutorials at every conceivable level available on the Web itself. That Primer above is just the beginning.

Automation

There are many more "HTML helpers" than we can shake a stick at...or even that this Oct '95 review article has already shaken several editorial sticks. But some of them have the seductive advantage of being free!

MS Word's Internet Assistant FREE!

If your preferred word processor is Word for Windows, Microsoft wants to GIVE you this add-in to facilitate making web pages. It has the seemingly odd requirement that you actually BE online on the Web while still in Word in order to make the conversion. This at least has the advantage that it can verify your URL addresses on the fly, but this online requirement may have more than a little to do with the fact that Microsoft is an internet provider itself.

Expect Internet Assistant to evolve since HTML is a moving target.

WordPerfect's Internet Publisher FREE!

If WordPerfect for Windows (whoever now owns the company) is your preference, there's a free converter for you as well.

Quarterdeck's WebAuthor for MSWord

The Ziff-Davis review found Quarterdeck's entry to be among the best. It too plugs into Word but is more current and doesn't oblige you to be online.

Student Interaction

Thus far, we've concentrated on the (narrow)casting aspect of Web authorship: sending information to the student. But the other half of the engagement is possible as well.

HTML Forms (Honor System exams)

Students can interact with the instructor not only by electronic mail but by responses to questions posed on the Web pages themselves. The link here is to a tutorial on "forms," the entities which return reader responses to the author or his agent devices. Scroll down that tutorial to see a screen shot of the form generated by the code at the beginning of the tutorial.

This form is merely a focussed e-mailer where specific questions and multiple choices are made and "submitted" to the page's author (via email). But it is possible (with the mastery of yet another language, e.g., PERL) to write programs to respond automatically to these responses.

With such programs, one could create adaptive exams for students. Presumably these would be practice exams since it is not possible to know who is supplying the responses. Students are not obliged to keep their passwords secret. Only an effective Honor System would permit student evaluation this way.

The Most Useful Form on the Web!

While we referred earlier to a particular Web Searcher, there are many of them which do their job, like Lycos here, by using a form to capture keywords for whose articles you are searching. Lykos, Web Crawler, and their ilk search out a large fraction of existing Web pages, adding keywords to their massive databases. While the searches are free, small ads appear to defray the costs of their efforts.

Off-Web

While the Web is currently being augmented to incorporate audio- and video-conferencing, not inconsiderable tools for pedagogy, these are still a few semesters from fulfillment. But only a few semesters; stay tuned!

However, even now, opportunities to connect with your students (and they with one another) are available off the Web.

E-mail (mailto in browser)

This one is obvious. Make sure, however, that you know how to create an address list in your favorite e-mail program; that way you can broadcast a response once to all.

UseNet discussion groups (asynchronous)

Earlier LISTSERVers permitted discussions in groups to be routed automatically to all members; the disadvantage is that one's in-box fills rapidly each day if you are a member of many lists.

Instead, U.T. Dallas encourages UseNet discussion groups. Like ListServers, you must do something to join them, but the discussion comes to you only when you summon it...have set aside time to give it some thought. Both are asynchronous in that the discussion occurs via notes in mailboxes rather than as on a telephone or citizen band radio.

MOOs (synchronous)

But when simultaneity is sought, it is available in unique Object-Oriented MUDs called MOOs. A MUD is a Multiple User Dungeon, after the game of Dungeons'n'Dragons, no doubt. Many "players" log on simultaneously to compete or cooperate with the game's purpose, which might be understanding your homework assignment! Study groups can form this way in virtual rather than actual space, and colleagues can agree to "appear" in the MOO at certain hours for conferences!

The Object Orientation has to do with the ability of each member to leave "things" for and examine "things" from others. A thing might be a text of homework solution strategies...or whatever.

The key is that conversations live only for those logged on, just as in citizen band radio. Dialogue is then possible.

A Formal Dialogue

Of course, asynchronous "dialogue" is also possible on the Web, but it implies that all participants edit Web pages. This is an example of such dialogue. It seems a higher price to pay than is reasonable unless, of course, the subject of the course is Web Editing!

Student Publication

But even if that's not the topic, it may well be that Web publication is viable as a showcase for term projects. This example is from a class on computer graphics. It is clear that the students took justifiable pride in these creations.

Not an Unmixed Blessing

If this has whetted your appetite for Web authorship, consider these (among other) Pros and Cons.

Advantages

Easy Updating of Content

Minimal Technical Support Required

Access Controllable from Campus to World

Wealth of Resources

Cross-platform Guarantee

Download Potentials (docs, data, apps)

Distance Learning (and revenue)

Disadvantages

Large Initial Effort

Current Bandwidth Limits Multimedia

Formatting Still Crude

Reward Structure Largely Absent

While this is true on many campuses, some have made efforts to encourage Web use in instruction. Much more will certainly be done in this regard as higher education comes to realize the Distance Education advantages of as ubiquitous and flexible a tool as the World Wide Web.

Example Proactive Initiative

A Result of that Initiative

An interdisciplinary look at Renaissance art.

Browse the Future

E-MailTo: Parr@UTDallas.edu

Last updated 17 November 1998

A.C.E.T. Fall Conference 29 September 1995, Dallas, Texas