HTML offered with Java and JavaScript an opportunity for preparation on the Web of rich educational materials with active elements supporting learner's activities.

Several programs/applets were developed in Java and JavaScript for typical elements that can serve as building blocks in development of educational materials [9, 10, 11]. But, to do this the author needs to know all three languages; or, for just to use such elements, he/she has to have at least very good knowledge of HTML - only few teachers do.

Since

• most of the computer literate teachers have a good knowledge of MS Word,
• MS Word offers rich formatting capabilities which can be further extended by macros written in Visual Basic for Applications [3, 5],
• MS Word documents can be produced internally in HTML,

we decided to base on MS Word the development of a teacher-friendly authoring system for production of active educational web pages.

The idea is the following:

• produce the static contents of the page in the ordinary MS Word using its Web Page template,
• using an additional menu, with a collection of active elements, insert them into the document (see Figure 2.),

The properties of active elements are determined by the corresponding dialogs (see Figure 3.).

When exporting the document into HTML the required additional support in JavaScript and Java is included into the web page.

Our system is still in the phase of a prototype. What should be its main capabilities? Here is a list of features contained in the current version:

• formatting and inclusion of multimedia (pictures, sounds, videos) is handled by MS Word,
• the main group of active elements supported by the system, are so called quiz elements (list selection, switches, yes/no selection, holes, free text answer; see Figure 1),
• additional active elements include: function graph drawing, calculator, dynamic GIF controller, …
• active elements can be linked to detectives and evaluators. They are collecting trace information and preparing evaluations of learner activities,
• the system can also use e-mail or WWW-server support to collect information about the progress of learners.

The procedures to support active web elements are written in JavaScript and Java, and bundled in some libraries. The authoring system is essentially an extension of MS Word Web Page template. It adds a collection of MS Word macros that support the insertion the active elements.

We are using MS Word 7.0 and assume a HTML 4 browser with JavaScript 1.2.

Let us illustrate the necessary steps on the case of holes.

Each entry is linked to a corresponding dialog (Figure 3.) by which the author determines the properties of the active element.

In Figure 5. we can see the holes in action.

The described authoring system can be easily extended to cover other types of interactive elements.

The proposed authoring system, without additional security enhancements and organizational solutions, can be mainly used for production of educational materials for self-education.

We believe that the teachers themselves should be the main producers of educational materials and that the programmers should provide them with cheap, powerful and easy to use development tools. Our system is a step in this direction.

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of Slovenia, Project Ro.

Klemen Bajec and Prof. Vladimir Batagelj

University of Ljubljana, FMF, Department of Mathematics

Jadranska 19, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia