Survey of Course Content Authoring Tools

A Survey of Course Content Authoring Tools is being conducted by Lachlan Blackhall from the Educational Development Group, College of Engineering & Computer Science at the Australian National University. This is to see which would be suitable for engineering and computer science courses. Lachlan would like to get input from beyond the ANU and educators are invited to complete the survey. Tools being considered include Moodle and ICE.

ANU has been conducting blended learning in its Engineering 'Hubs and Spokes' Project in collaboration with the University of South Australia. Papers on the project, are avialable.

ANU is also conducting a series of free hands-on Education Innovation Workshops during February 2011. These are intended for those developing courses with ANU's "Wattle" (Moodle based) Learning Management System. But educators from other educational institutions are welcome to attend:

• 04 Feb 2011 Engaging students with discussion forums
• 10 Feb 2011 Forums for Groups and Ratings
• 14 Feb 2011 Setting up and using online assignment submissions
• 17 Feb 2011 Managing groups and online teams
• 24 Feb 2011 Managing content delivery effectively
• 28 Feb 2011 Easy Quizzes

Slides in web pages

Peter Sefton has done a wonderful job getting his ICE education system to produce web based slides, as well as printed and web based learning materials, all from the one word processing document.

ICE uses the remarkable Slidy, which uses some CSS and a lot of Javascrpit, to turn a simple HTML document into a pretty slide show which can be driven from a web browser.

Previously I laboriously hand coded web pages to would work as slides, web documents and printed documents . But my hand coded system has some advantages over Slidy and ICE:

1. One file: ICE generates a web version of your document, a PDF versions for printing and the slide version. This is three files to keep track of: I just want one. I don't want a PDF version, just a printable web page will do. I want the slide notes in the same file as the slides.
2. Notes default: Slidy allows for notes to be included along with the presentation slides. You can press a button to see the hidden notes and can print them out. But you have to know to be able to do this. In most cases I want people to be able to see the notes: very rarely will they want to just see the slides. So I want the default changed so you see the notes and press a button to hid them.
3. Simple web page: Slidy uses H1 as the heading for each slide. But I want my web page to have one H1 for the title and H2 for the slides.

I have tried changing Slidy's behavior, without changing the Slidy code. After some thought I reasoned that it is the Javascript which made Slidy show slides. So if I turn off the Javascript I will get the notes showing by default. To do this I added some commands to the web server. To get the slides you supply the parameter "Slides"; without this, you get the notes:

1. Slides: http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/xml_publishing/index.shtml?slides
2. Notes: http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/xml_publishing/

This technique has the bonus that, as most people will not be looking at the slides, they will not need to download the Javascript.

But so far I have not worked out an easy way to change the H1 headings to H2. I could modify the Slidy Javascript to use H2, but am reluctant to create my own version of Slidy. Another option would be some XSLT to turn the H1s to H2s for Slidy.