Introduction

Web-based hypermedia and related technologies have attracted great attention, because they have obvious potential to improve the quality of teaching and learning at universities. The potential benefits include:

• Increased access for non-traditional students, for whom the traditional university format is impractical;
• Availability of material at all times and in all places;
• Responsiveness to students' learning styles by providing material in different ways and at different levels;
• Incentive to `ratchet up' by capturing the best presentations, the best interactions, the best questions, and preserving them;
• Student-directed learning rather than professor-directed teaching;
• Community and interaction based on ideas rather than physical presence.

Many courses have been developed using web pages as the presentation tool, and electronic mail and chat systems as the community-building tool. There are several deficiencies to this approach:

• The on-line course material is very often 'extra' material, increasing the demands on students;
• On-line courseware typically costs more, both to develop and to deliver to students;
• Material is not access-protected, causing loss of revenue for institutions and copyright problems for developers;
• The use of multiple tools requires students to learn many different interfaces, increasingly the cognitive overhead of the material that they want to learn.

We have developed several courses using the Hyperwave hypermedia system, developed at the Technical University of Graz in Austria. This system provides a seamless environment in which students can interact with hypermedia material, create their own additions, and communicate with one another and with the instructor. These courses are offered without any lectures, relying solely on interactions within the hypermedia system to convey content and create a learning community. Experience so far has shown that this approach works, and may even produce better learning outcomes than conventional lecture presentations.

An Introductory Computing Course

We illustrate the use of the system using CISC104, an introductory programming and computing science background course, taken by students in all years, and from all departments of the Faculty of Arts and Science. The approach has also been used in 3rd and 4th year courses in Computing Science. Students interact with the course material using an ordinary web browser, such as Netscape. Pages delivered by the Hyperwave server are enhanced with a standard set of buttons that allow users to identify themselves to the system, to create new documents, or to annotate existing documents. Hyperwave hypermedia is organised in two ways: the standard link paradigm is supplemented by a hierarchical collection paradigm. This provides extra context which helps users to avoid the feeling of not knowing where they are. The top level of the course material consists of the following collections:

• Introductory material about the course,
• Course home page,
• Core course material,
• Announcements,
• Questions and Answers,
• Assignments,
• Exercises,
• Social Area.

The core course material was organised into three streams, each partitioned by week. This meant that students could always tell how far they were supposed to have progressed. Each `lecture' consists of textual material, enriched with images, and with regular questions added to make it harder to interact passively with the material. The question and answer area allowed students to ask questions publicly and get them answered, usually within a few hours. Because everyone can see the answers, many students have their questions answered before they were asked. The assignments collection was used to `hand out' the programming assignments, and also to provide solutions after the due date. The exercises collection contained a weekly set of programming exercises and their solutions, to provide suggestions for reinforcing material. The social area allowed students to communicate on non-academic matters. Other aspects of the course were traditional. The instructors had office hours, and teaching assistants were available at scheduled times in their offices and in one of the computing laboratories. Assessment was based on programming assignments, a midterm examination, and a final examination. Student feedback fell into two categories. Some students, probably the majority, found no difficulty with the approach and appreciated the flexibility of delivery. A smaller group felt the absence of lectures keenly, at least at the beginning of the course. Discussions with some of them indicated that they believed, at some level, that lectures caused learning to happen without their active participation. It is easy to see, in retrospect, how such beliefs tend to be fostered by universities, and dispelling them may be the major contribution of technology to learning. Most found it possible to adapt their model of learning and to succeed in the course. Our experiences have been positive, and several more course are migrating to the Hyperwave system.

Why Hyperwave?

In the introduction, we indicated several deficiencies of the majority of hypermedia courseware approaches. We summarize how the Hyperwave system, and our incremental approach to development, avoid them. There are three essential aspects to making hypermedia courseware development cost-effective:

• Courseware must save money somewhere else. It is therefore critical that such courseware replace other teaching, rather than supplement it.
• Courseware must be developed incrementally, allowing savings from the very first delivery to be used to fund the next round of development. This makes it possible to start from modest amounts of seed money. Our initial offering of CISC104 required about four months of full-time work by a hypermedia development staff member. Upper-year and seminar courses are much cheaper to develop, since courseware provides perspective rather than content.
• Courseware does not have to be up to Hollywood standards to be effective, and does not all have to be developed by instructors. Students can make their own contributions to courseware, and such contributions are arguably more useful and impressive to other students. Seminar courses, in particular, can start from a list of the issues, the content being created by the discussions of the participants (which can then be preserved as starting points for subsequent offerings).

The problems of controlling access are handled extremely well by the Hyperwave system, which allocates read, , and delete privileges on a per-collection basis. Thus students can create documents, but not anywhere; and can control whether they are visible to the whole world, the class, a small group within the class, or are entirely private. The Hyperwave system provides a seamless interface with the functionality of a hypermedia browser, chat group, and electronic mail system. Once students have absorbed the basic paradigm, they can do everything related to a course within one environment. The Hyperwave courseware is available for demonstration purposes using the url http://hyperg.queensu.ca. A guest userid and password will be available during the poster sessions.