Creating online learning materials

So you've been using the Web for some time, but you still haven't found the ideal materials for your students. Sure there are some excellent support sites like Bizled (www.bized.ac.uk), but you want to be able to create your own materials - ones that are ideally suited for your students. So how do you go about it? How can you develop your own interactive learning materials for your students and put them up on the schoollcollege intranet? In this article we will aim to tell you about some of the tools that are available and which tool is most appropriate for which purpose.

As always with software, there is a wide range of options ranging from cheap and cheerful to expensive commercial tools. Happily for us, some of the free and cheaper tools are more than adequate for most purposes. The first stage though is to work out what you want to do. Do you simply want to create simple web pages or web versions of presentations? In this case, the easiest solution may be software already available to you like Microsoft Office. Or do you want to create interactivity on your web pages - multiple choice questions, crosswords or other activities? If this is what you want to do, there are once again a number of options.

Let's start with simply creating basic web pages. You may already have word files and presentations that you want to create versions of for your intranet. The best solution for this may be to use the 'Save as web page' option from Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint (this is available from the 'File' menu - see Figure 1).

This is a simple and quick way to create web pages. You can create links between documents by selecting the text that you want to act as the link and going to the 'Insert' menu and clicking on the 'Hyperlink' option. A dialogue box will appear and clicking on the 'browse' button will enable you to select the file to which you want to link (see Figure 2).

The easiest solution may be to create all the files you want and then add the links later. You can also use the 'Save as web page' option from Microsoft PowerPoint to create web versions of your PowerPoint presentations.

Having created these basic web pages, you may become a little more ambitious and want to add some questions and activities for your students. Perhaps the best way to start out down this road is with a piece of software called 'hot Potatoes'. This may not be the most likely sounding title for a useful piece of software, but it is an excellent package and is free for educational use. Hot Potatoes is available from (http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/). It is made up of a series of five packages, each one with a different purpose. With these packages, it is possible to create multiple choice exercises, crosswords, drag and drop exercises, text fill exercises and a range of others. The software is fairly easy to learn to use with good help and tutorials available from within the program and also from the web site.

One problem with the simple word solution is that you need to do a lot of work in organising the files and creating a whole series of separate pages. There are also no options for creating interactivity - that has to be done separately. A commercial option that may be one of the simplest solutions is a package called Coursegenie www.coursegenie.com.

This package acts as an add-on to Word where all the interactivity can be added through the Word styles menu (where you add heading 1, heading 2 and so on - see figure 3). Using Coursegenie you can split a single document into a series of interlinked web pages (including images, audio files, video files, flash movies and a range of other resources). You can also add captions, pop-ups, boxed text, definitions and even incorporate other web pages into yours (as 'includes') so that your students can click on them and explore them from within your pages. An excellent way to keep an eye on where they are going!

Using dialogue boxes you can add multiple choice, true/false questions and a range of other activities. These can very easily include photos, diagrams or charts. Once you have added everything you want, you can simply save the file as a series of web pages and the program will create all the pages, a table of contents with links and all the buttons, images and other resources it needs. You simply need to upload a single folder to your intranet and the whole thing will work. The beauty of this approach is that all the editing is done in Word, which should significantly shorten your learning curve and ensure that you can create highly professional looking materials very quickly.

If you want to go on to the next stage and create entire web sites and perhaps learn a little more about web technologies, then you will need to look at more commercial tools. One of the best around is Dreamweaver from Macromedia, but there are alternatives like Microsoft's FrontPage or Adobe's GoLive. If you are interested in any of these products, then do check carefully with software suppliers, as with most of them there are significant educational discounts available. For example, Macromedia offer a web design studio package with Dreamweaver, Fireworks (an image editor), Freehand (further image creation) and Flash (for creating Flash graphics and movies) all at a very significant discount on the full commercial prices.

So why not have a go - creating web materials may be easier than you thought.

Copyright Economics and Business Education Association Spring 2003
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