The purpose of an authoring system is to provide a convenient means of generating, organizing, and delivering "content". Some of these can also assume limited testing and management functions, and they can be either stand-alone or Web-based. A course management system integrates content delivery (including that based on traditional print materials) with assignments, testing, performance tracking, and often communications facilities.
Moodle is a course management system - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. This Cornell U. site offers additional documentation and developer aids.
For a detailed review of authoring and course management systems, see Steve Lower's article Systems and software for putting your course on the Web.
MyClass is a free service that allows teachers to set up class web sites that offer message boards and similar amenities without the need for space on a local server or HTML programming.
CAI as a medium for mainline instruction (S.K. Lower)
A Learner-Centered Approach to Multimedia Explanations: Deriving Instructional Design Principles from Cognitive Theory This article by Roxana Moreno and Richard Mayer sets out some of the theory relating to multimedia instruction, and describes an application to science teaching.
Hot Potatoes - a suite of six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Free to academic and non-commercial users.
JExam is a Java-based, cross-platform, multi-user testing package that enables custom question entry, test/quiz/homework taking, test/quiz/homework viewing, test creation, content management, and statistical analysis. It was developed by J. Martin of the Dept of Chemistry, U. of Georgia. A downloadable Installer is available. Unfortunately, I have been able to find little useful documentation, no introductory and generally accessible home page, and many of the Google references are dead links. Can anyone help?
Question Mark Software ("QMark") offers computerized assessment software. Versions are available for delivery of tests by Web, Windows, Macintosh, or DOS.
Respondus is a software system for writing quizzes to be presented through Web-CT.
Test Pilot is a software package that turns a standard web server into a powerful online assessment engine. It consists of an authoring database used for the creation of test, tutorial or survey questions and a platform-independent Web server extension to administer the assessment, record user submissions, automatically score those sumbissions and permit the easy analysis of user response data.
>The Diploma test-creation and administration package from Brownstone Software allows users to develop tests for self-assessment and examinations that can be packaged separately (as by textbook publishers) or delivered over the Web.
General information on concept mapping (Wikipedia article)
{ConceptMapping} - Another "wiki" site, organized by Martin Cleaver. (≤ Dec 2006 archive)
> {This page} by a nursing instructor shows how to construct concept maps and describes their role in learning. (≤ 2005)
WebMap: Concept Mapping on the Web - This article by B. Gaines and M. Shaw reports experience in taking an existing open architecture concept mapping tool and making it available on the Web in a number of ways.
Some sources of affordable concept mapping software
IHMC CmapTools - this free open-source software was developed by a group at U. of West Florida and is available for Windows, Mac OS-X, Linux, and Solaris platforms. The home page is itself a concept map; other pages are accessed by clicking on the icons under each map entry. For an example of its use in Chemistry, see the concept maps at the end of each section of my Atoms and the Periodic Table site.
PIViT (Project Integration Visualization Tool) was developed by the U Mich-based Project-Based Science group and is available as freeware for Macintosh and Windows.
C-TOOLS: Concept-Connector Tools for Online Learning in Science - A Java-based, on-line tool to enable students in large introductory science classes at the university level to visualize their thinking online and receive immediate formative feedback. Project site; more informative description.
SemTalk (it is not clear if this is related to SemNet, whose site appears to be dead in 2006.)
Molecular Arts (makers of Molecules-3d) has several collections of apparatus, periodic table, safety, and molecular images clip art.
Science ClipArt - this site contains links to a number of free sources, including some devoted to Chemistry.
Chemistry Pictures Gallery - an extensive set of chemistry-related art ranging from apparatus through molecules.
About.com's Chemistry ClipArt directory has links to a variety of sites.
> Making Matter: the atomic structure of materials is an extensive collection of tutorial pages relating to solids and includes a large number of images.
{Scientists at work cartoons} - a nice collection, but an almost unreadable color combination on the home page. (Last archive from Feb 2007)
Commercial sources
ChemSW offers some commercial sets of Chemistry clip-art and photo-art.
FotoSearch Chemistry Stock Photography collection - a collection of images; the small ones are free, but the larger versions are commercially licensed and quite expensive.
{Chemland} is a large suite of simulations suitable for instructional use designed by William Vining of U. Mass. The simulated experiments cover various topics of General Chemistry, and lend themselves to student assignments which can later be discussed in class. The exercises require the ShockWave browser plug-in. (Link is to archive of original 3/2004 version that was never updated.)
CHP Interactive Exercise Prototypes - Java and Perl scripts developed at Virginia Tech U to support Web-based quizzes
The Hot Potatoes suite includes applications for creating interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. This product, developed at the University of Victoria (Canada), is available for Windows and Macintosh, and is free for academic and non-commercial use.
Java and JavaScript materials for course support
- Kinetic-molecular gas simulation - a rather nice one by F-K Hwang of National Taiwan Normal U.
- Chemistry Experiments and Exercises (David Blauch, Davidson U) includes applets representing chemical equipment (for use in Web pages), as well as other applets covering a wide range of topics. They can be downloaded as a combined .zip file.
- Physical Chemistry Animations - a large collection of animations covering many areas of General and Physical Chemistry, collected and organized by Rob Schurko (U Windsor, Canada)
- George Wiger's JavaScript materials George is developing some Java applets that may be of interest to those who wish to explore this new object-oriented programming language.
- Gary Bertrand (U Missouri - Rolla) has a collection of JavaScript-enabled mini-lessons and practice exercises for General Chemistry.
- DivGraph is a JavaScript program under development by Robert Hanson at St. Olaf College. It can be plugged into any web page to provide real-time graphing capability, or it can be called with a function or x,y data and information for a quick graph in a new window. Numerous examples of scripts are available, as is a lesson on Q/K.
- Bob Hanson of St. Olaf college has assembled a collection of JavaScript-based exercise and simulators for General Chemistry.
The Chemistry Development Kit * (CDK) is a Java library for structural chemo- and bioinformatics. Components include QSAR descriptor calculations, 2D and 3D model building, the 2D structure editor JChemPaint, and NMRShiftDB, a database of organic molecules and their NMR spectra.
How to write Web-based computer-assisted test/homework questions using Perl, CGI, HTML, etc. Carl David of the University of Connecticut has developed a system for using the Web as a medium for distributing homework problems, and for submitting and checking the answers. More recently, he has assembled a Web-based tutorial covering the fundamentals of HTML and Perl programming for others who would like to implement such a system. This an excellent starting point for newcomers to CGI programming.
HTMLScript Quiz System can be used to create Intranet product knowledge testing systems, provide test preparation for educational and training institutions or to build distance learning applications. This applet allows you to run existing quiz systems or even create your own quiz!
irYdium Project - Carnegie-Mellon University. Java programs, applets, simulators for spectroscopy, statistical mechanics, etc.
Test and Quiz scripts from the CBI Resource Index
Tutorial Gateway (Carleton University) is a filter for a CGI-compliant HTTP server that makes it slightly easier to develop tutorial style questions and have them presented by most Web browsers. The person viewing a question can supply an answer, have that answer evaluated by the gateway, and receive a response appropriate to the answer.
Build your own quizzes in JavaScript - a good place to start with downloadable examples.
Chemistry Screencasts is a collection of mini-lectures on various chemistry topics with pictures and sound by Mark Ott of Jackson (MI) Community College — an interesting example of online multimedia in chemistry education. You have a choice of first-semester and second-semester topics.
Michelle Francl of Bryn Mawr College has prepared an extensive set of blogs, webcasts and podcasts. Some of these support first- and second year courses, others are for a wider, non-technical audience. All are thoughtful and engaging examples of ways to make Chemistry more interesting, and of how non-traditional media can be incorporated into a course. Some of the more interesting collections include Culture of Chemistry: The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry, and Chemistry 104 Lecture summaries
UC Berkeley offers webcast/podcast archives of lectures in certain courses, including the first-semester course Chem1a.
Special characters for Web viewing. For cross-platform compatability, avoid using the Symbol font; the character encodings differ on Mac and Windows systems, and may even vary between different browsers on the same system.
All modern browsers now support the HTML 4.0 codes which can be found here. Thus → or → produces →, and Δ or Δ renders D. Although most of the current browsers seem to recognize ½ as the code for "frac12", some render it as the extended form "1/2" instead of in the neater compact format; the browser you are presently using displays ½.
Mathematical Markup Language - MathML, a developing W3C standard, is to mathematical content as HTML is to text. MathML includes elements for encoding both the Presentation and Content of mathematics. It is currently supported by the open-source Mozilla browser and (through plug-ins) by some other browsers, including IE.
Math in HTML using style sheets - a very thorough exploration of the problems involving use of special characters and math symbols on Web pages, by Jukka Korpela. "Dan's Web Tips" is another good source of information on characters and fonts.
Using Greek and special characters from Symbol font in HTML - explains why you should not do it— and what you should do instead!
ChemWeb The SoftShell Home Page offers a downloadable copy of ChemWeb, free chemistry drawing software for the Web.
MathType is a an equation editing utility for producing equations for display in Web documents. (I use the Mac version and can recommend it.)
MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation for encoding mathematical content on the web.
Chemical Markup Language (derived from SGML and implemented in JAVA) is a scheme for including molecular information in HTML documents.
MS-Word macros for Chemistry - a large collection of useful macros by Robert Grossman, U. Kentucky.
Fonts
The STIX project home page describes current attempts to develop a standard Unicode set of special characters for publishing scientific and mathematical material on the Web.
Screen fonts - useful information for designers of Web pages and other material to be displayed on-screen, with links to sources. This excerpt from a [Macintosh] TidBits issue will also be of interest to Windows users.
{ChemSyn Font} - a popular sans-serif Chemistry TrueType font similar to Geneva. This is now available only for Macintosh systems. (Link is to last archived update 10/2006.)
It's generally agreed that Google is the "gold standard" of search engines for completeness, and the JavaScript pop-up you can download from their site makes it very convenient to use. Google also offers a Custom Search Engine that webmasters can now include in their own sites.
Some search engines attempt to help you focus your searches by suggesting semantically-related terms or categories which you can to refine your search. See Vivisimo's Clustry and AllTheWeb's "LiveSearch".
Scirus is a search engine specifically for scientific materials, including instructional pages. One has the option of searching for journal articles, for Web documents, or for both. It also provides a built-in means of refining your search as described in the preceding paragraph.
The Internet Archive provides a means of accessing older versions of Web pages and other materials that have been removed from the Internet. There are also links to other archiving projects.
A useful list of specialized search engines -
For someone else's take on search engines, see Harry Pence's 2004 article Using Meta Search Engines for Chemistry.
Bookmarking
So-called "social bookmarking", besides being an extremely useful way of building a personal bookmark collection which can be accessed from any location, can serve as a useful way of getting students involved in assembling a class-specific set of shareable Web links. Here is a review of several popular social bookmarking sites.
Furl is one of the more popular of these sites, and teacher Jim Wenzloff has prepared a very nice Guide on how to use this service.
PreFound is another similar service.
Meta tags
If you wish to make your Web page accessible to the outside world, you should include these tags which help search engines index the page in their databases. Perhaps the easiest way to get started is to simply examine the source code for this page (with Internet Explorer, click on View : Source); just copy the lines near the top that begin with <meta> and change them to whatever seems appropriate. For an in-depth description of these tags, see Dr. Clue's MetaTab Guide or the ClickAgents page.
For those who don't wish to dirty their hands with HTML source code, there are also a number of Web-based metatag generators that create the tags for you, based on your answers to a series of prompts. The AnyBrowser generator is probably as good as any.
Search engine submission and positioning
Everyone would like their Web page URL to appear near the top of the first page retrieved by a browser, and a considerable industry has developed in order to assist Web developers to achieve this goal. Unfortunately, there is no single sure way to ensure top billing (other than to be billed for it.) The different search engines employ their own criteria to rate URLs, and many take considerable pains to thwart those who attempt to "spam" their systems by such means as repeating meta-keywords, etc. The best the non-commercial developer can do is to learn as much as possible about search engines and how they work. Here are a few useful leads:
SearchEngineWatch provides a good survey of search engine submission tips, although their practice of teasing you to become a member (and get more information) is annoying.
The ZDNet index page has links to numerous articles on search engines and Webmaster resources.
"Spiders and worms and crawlers" from U.C. - Santa Barbara is a nice introduction to how the various search engines work, despite being far from up-to-date.
Finally, my personal plea to developers of Web pages: always show your name and E-mail link, and some means of getting back to an appropriate home page that contains the name of your institution. Also, let the world know when your page was last modified. This can be done automatically; see the source code of the table at the bottom of this page for an example (and if anyone understands how this works, please let me know!)
Miscellany
Copyright issues. "Why copyright today threatens intellectual freedom" - a public policy report from the Free Expression Policy Project".
Lifetimes of educational hyperlinks - an account, with references, of an ongoing study on the longevity of URLs referenced in a group of science education sites.
MakeAShorterLink This web site allows you to generate a shorter, simpler address from a URL that may be too long or complicated to appear in a printed article or to be pasted into a form or an E-mail.
(How to Build a Course Website} - this defunct Macromedia site contains some templates and advice that might be useful for rank beginners. (Link is to archive of last update, 2004)
Harry Pence has prepared a series of tutorials on the use of multimedia that offer some guidelines and provide useful information on the design of presentation software and materials. One of these, discussing color blindness, should be of particular interest to those who use color in their presentations.
The Rapid Intake site offers Unison and Flashform tools for creating interactive Flash-based materials.
