Separation of educational and technical content in educational hypermedia

The creation and development of educational hypermedia by teachers

and educational staff is often limited by their lack of computing skills, time

and support from the educational institutions. Especially the lack of computing

skills is a hinderance to most of today¿s educational experts. The

problem is to find out how those educational experts could be supported by

computer based tools which are tailored especially to their needs without

having any technical limitations.

In this study the separation of technical and educational content in educational

hypermedia is examined as a solution to this problem. The main

hypothesis of this study is that the separation of technical and educational

content is possible if it is based on a fine-grained structure of different teaching

and learning strategies and their conversion into an authoring tool. Such

an authoring tool would make the creation of educational hypermedia very

easy for teachers and therefore enable them to overcome the existing obstacles.

The development of a new model, the creation of a new XML language

and the implementation of a new authoring tool form the basis for a detailed

investigation. The investigation was done by undertaking several research

tasks like the evaluation of the XML language and the authoring tool by a

group of educational experts of different knowledge domains, the practical

usage of the authoring tool for the creation of real-life based educational

material and the analysis of the gained research results.