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

3.4 EFTECS at EHP-Layer 3 EFTECS
3.4 EFTECS at EHP-Layer
As introduced in section 3.1, the EHP-layer of the EFTECS works with the single
components of a TLS. In this context, an EHP is defined as a single piece of
hypermedia content (text, sound, animation, etc.) combined with some specific
piece of educational information. Therefore, EHPs are the most basic components
of the EFTECS. They are designed to build, in combination with the educational
information of the TLS- and the EM-layer, material for educational hypermedia.
Additionally, the working scope of the EHP-layer lies on the lowest level of the
model and it does not only manage every single EHP, but also the tagging of each
EHP, the storage of the data or the retrieval of the data.
Another task that is fulfilled by the EHP-layer is to structure the educational con-
tent (text, videos, pictures, multimedia in general) by adding information about
the educational meta-data. This additional meta-data divides the single multime-
dia elements into different categories, for example “subject area”, “difficulty” or
“required previous knowledge”. The EHP-layer will also provide the educational
expert with a structured view of already existing EHPs. This summation of EHPs
will be addressed as Content Space and introduced in more detail in section 3.7.
To achieve a complete separation of the educational from the technical content of
all the EHPs of the different TLSs it was necessary to analyse every single compo-
nent of the TLSs. This analysis resulted in the fact that the additional educational
information can be grouped together in the following EHP-information tags:
3.4.1 Physical information
The information about the actual place, media-type and the preferred application
of the EHP is important for the authoring tool. Without this kind of information
the authoring tool would not be able to build the educational module which has to
be delivered to the student. The single meta-tags have the described purposes:
• URL
The URL information about the EHP allows the EFTECS to access different
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