Using HTML for Organizing Student Projects through the Internet

Over the past five years education has been energized by a steady increase in that extraordinary thing called the Internet. In the past two years, the World Wide Web, a colorful subset of the Internet, has provided further testimony to the efforts of educators worldwide to use the Internet as a tool for learning. The Web is especially fertile ground for teachers who wish to use electronic documents to enrich their courses. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language of Web documents, is a standard for marking text so that it can be displayed by different Web browsers running on a wide array of computers. Most of us can remember the dot commands used by early word processors; HTML works something like that, but its potential goes far beyond. Most teachers have used hypertext at one time or another, such as HyperCard on the Mac. They may have even written hypertext scripts for their courses. The system described in this article takes the hypertext idea a step further by getting the student active in the process. Through HTML and the Internet, hypertext has taken on a new role as a facilitator of navigation on the Web and as a tool for enhancing communication. * Our Experience and Our System This article describes our experiences at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) in using the Internet and HTML to create an interactive teaching environment. It includes the Internet exploration methods faculty use and our hypertext design strategy for student projects. HTML's hypertext features enable students to link Internet information to their projects and papers, making them living documents wired with hypertext buttons. The system we describe in this article was designed to do several things. First, it serves as a mechanism for improving communication between faculty and students. Second, it gives students control over the structure and content of what they present to the outside world via the Internet. Thus, students become teachers themselves, serving as knowledge providers to all who access their Web pages. The student author will never know all who have seen their document or what other applications of its ideas may have been generated by readers. By linking their projects and papers to the Web, students make their work a part of the Web itself -- to live after their course or academic program is over. Indeed, the Web is stocked with useful information that was created by programmers or students who posted the material while they were enrolled at various universities. Third, the hypertext system was designed to introduce students to the Internet in a focused, purposeful way, in the context of management information and database management systems courses. Other disciplines are also using these methods effectively at NSU -- in educational systems and instructional design, for example. Fourth, the system was designed to provide a forum for sharing ideas and for synergy. The features of HTML enable a student to focus others' attention on important aspects of their documents. As students exchange materials about their projects and papers with other students in the course, expectations are that learning will be enhanced; the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. This sharing extends beyond the boundaries of the course since other students and faculty within NSU's School of Computer and Information Sciences can view the final projects, as can the whole external audience on the Web. The Web-based hypertext system enables one student's project to become a training opportunity for other students and even for people outside the immediate course. Finally, the total of all class projects form a body of knowledge about the subject that can serve as a national resource. * Background on NSU's Online Programs The Web page posting of student projects in courses must be understood in a context of the culture of distance education and online programs at NSU. …