Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

4.7 Material delivery 4 HEAT
4.7 Material delivery
The final step in the authoring process is the delivery of the educational material
to the student. Up to this point, this PhD project has dealt with the separation of
the educational and the technical content in educational hypermedia. It becomes
now important to know how the educational material is actually delivered and how
this is done technically.
First of all, the author creates the educational material he wants to deliver as de-
scribed in 4.8. When the author produces the authored EM, it is automatically
stored in the content space and the educational material is specifically transformed
into a WWW based format.
Depending on the EM created by the author, a start page is created which func-
tions as an entrance point for the student to begin his way through the module.
Additionally, the student’s further navigation through the EM is supported by the
created material based on the linkage of the material in the HEAT.
To achieve the needed transformation of the educational material into the WWW
based form it was necessary to undertake the following technical implementation.
The connection of XML files with XSL files is one of the important developments
of this PhD. The implementation had to address these issues:
• The XML file had to be interpreted and displayed to the student by Internet
Explorer.
• The specialised XSL files had to be created.
• The functionality of the Java Script within the XSL files had to be imple-
mented.
• Whenever the material is accessed the XSL files are interpreted by the web
browser and displayed to the student.
• The XSL files can be programmed in various ways that meet exactly the
specific requirments for the correct presentation of the respective material
to the student. This is a further proof of the successful application of the
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