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

8.2 Review of the HEAT 8 DISCUSSION
However, during the practical evaluation of the author, several problems with the
content space in its current form were identified.
Firstly, as soon as some educational material is stored in the content space, the
search for some specific material is not optimal. The content space needs some
improved search functions and filter criteria exceeding the existing ones. This is
not a major problem and should be soluble by some additional implementation
within the HEAT.
Secondly, at the start of the EFTECS and the HEAT there is no material in the
content space available for reuse. To avoid every single bit of educational material
having to be authored with the HEAT, it will be necessary to design, implement
and evaluate some import functions to allow existing educational material to be
imported into the content space.
Finally, it was stated during the interview evaluation that a printing function for the
created material was needed by the test candidates (cf. chapter 6). Furthermore,
not only a printing function should be designed, but different export functions as
well. The XML based design of the EFTECS is an optimal base for such export
functions.
8.2.7 Quality of produced material
One of the goals of this PhD project is to create educational material for usage and
delivery via the World Wide Web. Therefore, it is necessary to address the quality
of the material produced by the HEAT.
During the interview evaluation in chapter 6 and the practical evaluation in chapter
7 it was observed that the authored material was converted into a WWW based
format based on the EFTECS. This conversion step worked fine, but the quality of
the converted material was relatively poor compared to the actual state of the art in
web design, as far as for example the graphical design or the usage of multimedia
content is concerned.
This lack of quality is based on the fact that the HEAT was designed and im-
plemented with limited resources. The further improvement of the HEAT must
address these issues and could be done during future work (cf. section 9.2).
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