Course-notes on the Web

Why Bother?

All courses notes are instantly available to the students. If students know that material is available on-line, they can listen to lectures. Can enhance material with graphics (easy), passive animation (fairly easy) and background readings.
Can integrate tutorial material and interactive material and (later) will be able to integrate tests.
May well be the preferred method of providing course notes and evaluating learning

Statutory Warning

Note that this talk only discusses the technical issues: clearly we need to provide infrastructure, discuss security etc. Also the techniques is intended to supplement a live teacher, not to supplant one.

Putting your course-notes on the Web via HTML: the one page summary.

Most word processors have invisible characters imbedded into the text for (e.g.) new paragraph. Hyper-Text Markup Language makes these explicit: e.g. a paragraph is marked by
 the text .
All HTML tags have this format: < tag >, and sometimes you need to show where the tag ends via </tag>. However it is far more flexible than any word-processor file, since it can be read by any browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, and you can build in links to other documents, images or what you will. You can link to any document on any Web site in the world by exactly the same process, but let's not get too fancy yet!

The various tags which you need at the most preliminary stages are

paragraphs,
<TITLE> title,
<H1>headings
lists
links
anchors.

If you want to build in some interactivity, you can do this via forms. It is quite easy to build in multiple choice questions or "fill in the blank" or check a numerical answer. There are also limitations: Netscape will only recognize characters 1-127 in ASCII code, which means only Latin letters, punctuation and numbers. You can code (e.g.) é via <&eacute>, but its ugly. To handle Greek letters or math symbols, need Symbol font:
e.g. y = y. You can make coloured font via
y = y.
(You don't know what colour "#009933" is? Fortunately it is automated!)

There are a lot of good introductions to HTML: e.g. University of Melbourne.Note that you should be using HTML 4.0

There are a lot of editors that allow you partially automate this process, some of which are designed solely to generate HTML files, some of which are add-ons to ordinary word-processors. e.g Nisus Writer, BBEdit (for the Mac) , Word or Wordperfect for either. There are other specialized processors that allow you to do site maintenance as well: e.g. Dreamweaver or Frontpage. The steps are:

Create a first draft using (say) Word
Save your file as HTML
Look at it via Netscape (just to encourage you!)
Go through the document, putting in links to other documents and pictures.
Load the final document and the diagrams onto your server.

For example, my demo document is my class notes for part of a lecture on the history of astronomy, where I am talking about Galileo.