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

9.3 Contribution to knowledge 9 CONCLUSIONS
9.3 Contribution to knowledge
The main contribution to knowledge of this project is the creation of a frame-
work that simplifies the creation of educational hypermedia content especially
for teachers. This framework is based on the separation of educational content
from technical content in educational hypermedia. Specifically, this framework
has been developed with specialised meta-information tags based on teaching and
learning strategies, which contributes to the field of educational hypermedia sys-
tems. Furthermore, the framework was built on the fine-grained components of
teaching and learning strategies, the EHPs. This fine-grained approach of the
EFTECS allows educational experts to create educational content for the WWW
based on their expertise in teaching and learning strategies.
Another contribution to knowledge is made by the insights gained from the eval-
uation process of this project and the accomplishment of the three research objec-
tives. The interview evaluation, the practical evaluation and the discussion of the
data showed the usabilty of the EFTECS and the HEAT.
Altogether, the main conclusion of this study is that authoring tools in educational
hypermedia should use the separation of educational and technical content based
on different teaching and learning strategies. The usage of the EFTECS allows
educational experts with low computing skills to create educational content for
delivery via the World Wide Web.
Parts of the work have been presented as a poster presentation at the Hypertext99
conference [187] and as a paper at the ED-Media 2000 conference [176]. Another
paper about the separation of educational and technical content in educational
hypermedia is currently being written.
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