One of the most important and widespread uses of computer technology in education is for the creation and presentation of structured educational content. Before the internet revolution, so called ‘courseware’ would be developed for computer assisted learning (CAL) or computer-based training (CBT) purposes. The courseware would be distributed on CD or over a university network and played on standalone desktop machines. The primary interaction would be between a single learner and the software, in other words student-content interaction. Generally the design of courseware would involve an instructional designer as well as a content specialist, a graphic designer and a programmer. This approach is both expensive and requires a range of skilled personnel.

With the advent of the WWW and the use of the internet in education, HTML became an obvious choice for educational content designers, since HTML content would run anywhere and good-looking pages that combined both text and graphics could be put together with relative ease. Although hand-crafting HTML code was always likely to put many educationalists off creating content this way, the early HTML editors were very simple and the set of tags were small enough for teachers and lecturers to put their own pages of content together and present them on a website or in one of the emerging LMS environments.

By 2000 the variety of possibilities for presentation of material had become both richer and more varied with the advent of frames, toolbars, more sophisticated form elements, scripting possibilities using javascript or asp, and animation capability using macromedia Flash. Amongst other things these advances in technology allowed for the possibility of interactive elements most notably in question and test capability. However, the greater range of technology skills required to create web content that made use of these features once again became prohibitive for the majority of teachers in secondary and tertiary education.

Recognising this problem, the major LMS vendors stepped in to the breach by supplying WYSIWIG HTML editors and templates with clean graphical layouts and text editing areas to simplify the task of course creation. Whilst such tools provide a solution to the immediate problem of allowing non-technical academics to create their own online content, it suffers from a number of drawbacks:

  • Firstly, the standard web-based model of most LMS systems means that the user is operating on a client/server system with bandwidth restrictions; this is a cumbersome and slow way to edit content where each update requires an HTTP request/response cycle.
  • …

—–

Britain, S. (2005): A review and analysis of content authoring software in relation to eXe