Separation of educational and technical content in educational hypermedia

The creation and development of educational hypermedia by teachers
and educational staff is often limited by their lack of computing skills, time
and support from the educational institutions. Especially the lack of computing
skills is a hinderance to most of today¿s educational experts. The
problem is to find out how those educational experts could be supported by
computer based tools which are tailored especially to their needs without
having any technical limitations.
In this study the separation of technical and educational content in educational
hypermedia is examined as a solution to this problem. The main
hypothesis of this study is that the separation of technical and educational
content is possible if it is based on a fine-grained structure of different teaching
and learning strategies and their conversion into an authoring tool. Such
an authoring tool would make the creation of educational hypermedia very
easy for teachers and therefore enable them to overcome the existing obstacles.
The development of a new model, the creation of a new XML language
and the implementation of a new authoring tool form the basis for a detailed
investigation. The investigation was done by undertaking several research
tasks like the evaluation of the XML language and the authoring tool by a
group of educational experts of different knowledge domains, the practical
usage of the authoring tool for the creation of real-life based educational
material and the analysis of the gained research results.