Papers in PDF format

Introduction
AHP: Academic Home Page
Timothy Foster, M.A.
Office of Instructional Development
Northern Arizona University, USA
Timothy.Foster@nau.edu
Marilyn Fritz, M.A. Ed.
Office of Instructional Development
Northern Arizona University, USA
Marilyn.Fritz@nau.edu
The Academic Home Page project at Northern Arizona University was implemented to provide faculty with an
ability to efficiently, and with relative ease, develop an effective interactive academic home page. Key features
of the template produced by the development team include a clean user interface design, information flow
design, balanced graphics, and instructional strategies. The visual appearance of the Academic Home Page
has been modified slightly and produced in several versions to appeal to the personal preferences of faculty. An
automatic HTML page creation process using forms for text input was considered, but it was decided that
faculty developing home pages using this method would not have the knowledge and skills necessary to
maintain their home pages.
The templates link to the Office of Instructional Development home page Instructional Toolkit, a critical
component in assisting faculty in technical maintenance, as well as improving the instructional efficacy of this
medium. The Instructional Tool Kit provides useful information about how to connect to the campus computer
services such as PPP logins, listservs, news groups, and e-mail. This kit also contains innovative instructional
strategies for use with the instructors weekly activities.
Faculty interest, as well as a call from the western governors’ to create a virtual university, has also provided a
new arena for world wide web development. Enhancing and teaching courses on the internet is now in the
forefront. However, quality of delivery is a growing concern. The Academic Home Page and Instructional
Tool Kit help assure a minimal level of quality that is superior to many instructional home pages currently on
the web. The Tool Kit also provides innovative strategies for incorporating proven traditional instructional
strategies into the web environment.
Academic Home Page Overview
The Office of Instructional Development (OID) has a mandate to facilitate faculty implementation of new
technologies for instruction. OID strives to provide solutions to problems faculty encounter when they
integrate technology into instruction. Although the internet is nothing new, the evolving world wide web
environment offers unique possibilities for instruction.
The world wide web environment demands a new approach to designing and publishing information to take
advantage of its inherent strengths. The ability to incorporate graphics and link to internal and external
sources provides a powerful medium for creating more dynamic documents.
World wide web pages have been used predominately for information distribution only. An example of this
use can be seen on numerous web pages. These web pages are not only text intensive, but they appear to be
designed like most word processed documents. This graphic web environment supports much more
interactivity than traditional word processed documents. The HTML language supports many new and
exciting features such as animation, and even 3-D environments such as JAVA. One of the more powerful
interactive aspects of designing an HTML document can be found in using links to other documents. Internal