Web Teaching Guide

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Horton, Sarah (2000).  Web teaching guide: A Practical approach to creating course web sites.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER ONE: PLANNING

The first step is to conduct a thorough means assessment (i.e., needs assessment).  Assess institutional resources, personal impact of the project, and your goals for the web site.  Then create a draft of an organizational structure for your web site.

 A more typical approach in education would be to define the goals or purpose your web site first and then consider how to implement those goals.  Yet how you use technology to address your teaching needs will be mostly shaped by your circumstances.

 Software: Are there courseware systems (e.g., CourseInfo, WebCT)available at your institution?  Also, find out what web authoring software your institution supplies and supports.  These programs range from text editors, to visual editors, to full-fledged html authoring programs.  Are there conversion utilities for materials that are already in electronic format?  How about institutional templates?

 Training: does your institution offer any courses on creating web sites?

 Support: most institutions have an academic computing unit that supports the use of computing in education.  Failing that, how about hiring students to work on your web site?

 Facilities: some schools provide special computing facilities for faculty to use. 

 Funding: seek funding either through your institution or through funding agencies.

Personal

 Define your Objectives

 Scope

 (A sample project proposal is included.  It provides a statement of goals, a discussion of the project, and an implementation plan.)

 Plan your site

Content inventory:

 (sample content list)

 Site architecture

Organize your content list into an organizational architecture.  It is possible to use different organizational schemes: for example, browsing works well with subject groupings, while searching is best served by alphabetical listings.

 Classifying content

Create a classification system that effectively describes your content.  You might use a location metaphor.  Or, you might use functional groupings.  Whichever method you choose, you must use clear and consistent labels.

 Card sorting

A useful technique involves making a pile of index cards, with each card listing a content item you intend to include on your site.  Go through the stack and make piles of the items that you think belong together.  Then, ask others to do the same.

 Outlining

You can also use the outlining function of your word processor to classify your content.

 Site structure

The site structure helps your users form a mental model of your content.

 Navigation

Will well designed that addition system not only reflects the site's structure, but gives users an overview of the site's content as well.

 Site links vs. page links

Site links are the links that appear on every page of a site; page links are local links that relate to the content of a page.  If your content is sequential, minimize your page links.  If your material is made up of information that needs to be directly accessed, use lots of page links.

 Site guides

 CHAPTER TWO: DEVELOPING CONTENT

Text

You will probably have to rewrite materials (or even write new materials) because the style of the writing you have already done may not work well on the web.  Web readers tend to scan text online and read text off line.

 Writing style

The web is a peculiar writing genre.  Here are some tips to make your documents more "weblike":

 Chunking

Web surfers generally do not read pages in sequence…there's no way to tell where they've been or where they'll go after visiting your page.  As a result, your site must be like an encyclopedia, with a fairly comprehensive presentation of a topic on every page.

 What is a "chunk"?

 Page length

Generally, web pages should be short, and longer only if they are primarily intended for printing.  However, the primary measure page length should be the structure of your content.

 Printing vs. reading online

Most people prefer to read lengthy or complicated text offline.  Therefore, don't divide content like this up too much or it becomes hard to print.  If your content is more like a reference work, users are likely to read it on line so dividing it up is OK.

 Links

Poor links disrupt narrative flow:

 Online resources

Web sites

 Finding web content

 Evaluating web content

 Tips:

 Databases

 Downloadable

We use the web to get stuff.  Therefore, one possible function for your course web site is to distribute course materials.  This means that you need not necessarily translate documents from their original format into html. 

Examples of files many users can open:

 Interactivity

The web is by its very nature interactive:  users actively participate by choosing which links to follow.  But interactivity can also include:

 Discussion

 Multimedia

Analog vs. digital

Compression

Downloading multimedia

About web images

 Image sources:  cameras, scanners, images from video, purchased images

 About web audio

 About web video

Frame rates

Compression

 Tips:

 Virtual reality

 Copyright and intellectual property

A common misconception is that if something is posted on the web, then anyone can use it.  Not so!  The following factors are considered when dealing with a case of possible copy writing infringement:

 Simplified Fair Use Guidelines (Source: agreement on guidelines for classroom copying and the guidelines for educational use of music)

Additionally:

 Fair Use Guidelines For Educational Multimedia (source: fair use guidelines for educational multimedia)

 Many teachers violate these rules in the classroom.  However, such use is not public enough to gain notice.  On the web, however, dissemination is greater and thus so are your chances of getting caught.

 How to stay legal

 Protection of ownership

 Publishing student work

If you use your site to post students' work, you need their permission.  That's because placing a document on the web constitutes making a copy, and reproduction rights are exclusive to the author of a work. 

 CHAPTER THREE: CREATING THE SITE

Establish a page design

 Construct a framework

Text:

Images:

 Multimedia

 Preparing multimedia

 Processing audio

 Processing video

 CHAPTER FOUR:  USING THE SITE