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The user of such a system is mainly absorbing information, but tutorial support is missing, e. g. by answering
the student's questions or having him solve problems. The latter is possible by integrating multiple-choice tests,
however, these are not suitable for more complicated problems and do not support the student in his strength
and weaknesses. This will be discussed in more detail in the next section.
3 A Prototype for Tomorrow's University Education
The development of computer-based courses ist most often done using special authoring software. Usually, an
interdisciplinary team of content providers, media experts and designers join their efforts to produce a
multimedia package, which is then sold to the general public as a CD-ROM. The time and costs for producing
such a package are substantial: everything has to be developed from scratch since no parts or modules can be
used from previously produced packages. Also, it is not possible to modify, enhance or adapt such a course to
one's needs.
However, with the amount of educational resources freely available on the Internet, we favour an open,
modular approach, which can be compared to the object-oriented software-engineering approach, where
previously implemented software modules can be easily reused. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the
development of course material, it is desirable to be able to focus on content instead of the graphical
presentation of a specific topic[+].
As a way out of the dilemma, our approach is to combine the documents of an electronic library with on-line
lecturing, to add multimedia components and tutorial elements, which are indexed upon insertion to enable full
retrieval, and to integrate everything into a powerful, networked hypermedia system such as Hyper-G ([Ma96],
[DH95]). Thus, if provided with graphical interfaces for the course developer and the student, we are able to
produce modular, interactive educational environments at little costs where feedback between the system and
the user ensures that the benefit for the student is substantial if used in conjunction with traditional studying
techniques.
As the basis for our prototype, we took a commonly used textbook in undergraduate curricula, whose postscript
version was partitioned in sufficiently small sections and then inserted into the server. A number of freely
available computer simulations were enhanced, provided with a user-friendly interface and linked to the
relevant book section. If suitable, we provided links to the appropriate parts of previously stored on-line
lectures. The assignments were also added along with the solutions so they could be retrieved later.
To register, students fill out a form from their Web browsers to be able to access the educational environment
after identification. The list of students is automatically kept up-to-date and can be used later for management
purposes. Identified students can add own data or references or make annotations to any kind of document,
thus creating a personalized view of the environment.
In order to improve navigation between various parts of the system, it is crucial to introduce typed links to
inform the user about the document type and additional information about the document being accessed when
following a link.
Since undergraduate computer science courses focus on teaching basic algorithms and data structures, it is
important to include a programming environment, which enables the students to train their programming
skills and to visualize and analyze the output of their efforts with the help of a visual debugger. Thus, if an
assignment is completed, the code could be automatically extracted and linked to the solved assignments. Since
the correction of theory assignments cannot be automated, the solution, which is written with the help of a text
editor, is sent to the system upon completion. The solution can automatically be forwarded to the assigned
tutor, or either a link is generated on the fly between the tutor's collection associated with a spefic student and
a completed assignment. Comments from the tutor can be appended via the annotation mechanism.
Concerning the tutorial aspects of a system, i. e. the ability to ask and answer questions, the feedback for
questions having been asked before can be automated by accessing a database which contains the
corresponding answers. All other questions could be forwarded to the tutors via e-mail if they are not currently
logged on, or via a text window which the tutor can access via the user interface. If an answer can be provided