Along comes the web


Luckily, the huge success of the World Wide Web created a flurry of activity from tool makers, initially those working from a garage, followed eventually by the household brands, to support the millions of enthusiasts building web pages. In the spirit of the web, these tools ranged in price from free to very cheap, but were still feature-packed and generally reliable. Of course these tools were not made for producing e-learning, but that didn’t stop them being used for that purpose.

There are hundreds of web development tools, many of these HTML editors, but some providing WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) facilities that keep a distance between the developer and the code. Using just the basic facilities of HTML and without special coding in scripting languages such as JavaScript, it is possible to produce quite reasonable e-learning materials, albeit with a very restricted range of interactivity.

Add JavaScript to the mix and you can do just about everything you need interactively, including all sorts of question and answer routines, dragging and dropping and simulations. The problem is that, although JavaScript sounds like a friendly sort of a language, it requires serious programming and the help of a programmer, serious or otherwise. Your typical e-learning developer should not be expected to do this sort of work.

So back to the toolmakers. Surely they will extend their tools to provide templates and editors that allow you to create the interactivity required in e-learning, without the need for direct contact with the code. Well in one case they have: Macromedia have created an extension to Dreamweaver, perhaps now the de facto WYSIWYG web editor, called Dreamweaver MX for e-Learning , which does just that. There are no similar facilities in Microsoft FrontPage or any of the other web development tools, but then only a very small proportion of their customers are using the tools to create learning materials.




E-Learning's Greatest Hits
E-learnings Greatest Hits
ISBN: 0954590406
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 198

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