Webpage infrastructure on a physics educational website

Abstract - We present recent development on the infrastructure of webpages in a physics educational website. What do we mean by infrastructure of a webpage? This includes all visible and interacting elements however not the content document itself. The content documents are usually written by teachers or experts in their fields, but not necessarily experts in using HTML. Teachers cannot spend hours learning editing and programming techniques each time they want to present some contents. You only need to think about the navigating tools that must be included on a page to become part of a set, or when teachers would like to include some interactive elements (as Java applets) in their documents. How can this infrastructure aid teachers in their task? How can the infrastructure aid students in using the web?

I. INTRODUCTION

The present paper is, in some sense, one stage of some years of working in a group called la baldufa [1,2,3]. This group was founded in 1995, just when Internet began to spread through Europe. It is currently a team of five teachers from the Dept. Física i Enginyeria Nuclear, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. la baldufa has the aim of studying how the web can be used to teach and learn physics. We have been working in different areas, such as:
1. Setting up a server to properly control all the information contained in the project.
2. Making and using webpages on physics [4.5].
3. Constructing webpages, which include interactive activities in an easy way [6,7].
4. Simplifying the editing of good quality physics webpages ( equations, diagrams...)[8] .
5. Building an educational search engine.

By integrating all these areas, the teaching and learning processes using la baldufa resources, will be improved. It must be easy for teachers to teach and for students to study, each following their own strategies. This integration is done by two essential elements in the web infrastructure: the head and the library ( see Fig. 1).

The head appears at the top of the window browser. The library appears at the bottom. Between them, in the main part of the window there is the content document. The content document could be basically an html page edited by some html editor and using simple techniques, including some required links, images... The full responsibility of the content document is the teacher itself, who decides when it must change, however the head and the library will remain constant.

II. THE HEAD

The head is a thin webpage, which appears at the top of the browser window (see Fig. 2), it is no more than eight millimetres wide and it is optimised to aid the content document.

The main function of the head is to help in the navigation through the content document. Some of its functions are visible in the head itself. Others are hidden.
The head is intelligent enough to quickly read the content document when this is loaded and do some actions:
1. It shows the title of the content document.
2. If the content document is a worded problem, then the head will show a link to the solution. If it is a document with the solution, then the head will show a link to the worded document. It is not necessary to write anything to specify it, either in the worded-document or in the solution-document.
3. If the content document has some anchors, then the head will show them on a rolling list. We usually use this trick to easy travel through the content document, jumping to the desired section.
4. It makes it easy to go to some common tools: graphical calculator, library, windows browser management
5. The head automatically puts targets on the links of the content document. If it is an external link (not residing in la baldufa server), when clicking the head automatically opens a new window.
6. If the linked page corresponds to an applet from the server collection, then a new simple size-adjusted window is opened to place the applet, and an entry in the rolling list options of anchors is added. In this way, the applet's use is optimised. The teacher does not need to write special tags in order to include it on the page and the student can use it as an element integrated in the webpage (see Fig. 3).

7. The head allows the user to define his/her home page.
8. It has some tools to manage windows browser. For example it allows opening the content document in a new window.
By using the head the authors of the content documents do not need to worry about including navigational aids, and the students can read and use the content document focusing in its content itself, instead of the way to reach them!

III. THE LIBRARY

The library is a tool that makes it easy to find documents in the server and/or other websites. We will not focus our attention to the way it internally works, we present it a separate paper. We want to show here which is the role it plays as an integration element in the infrastructure's webpage. Its visible face is placed at the bottom of the browser's window (see Fig. 4).

We have designed two kinds of tools to access to documents. One of them has the function of summarising the documents residing in la baldufa. This summary is easy to use and takes up very little visible space and can offer the access to a lot of documents. New documents entering in the server are easily referenced and can be reached by this summary.
The other one is the library, that is, it offers the access to a lot of documents, in the server or outside, by using a complex multi-entry interface. The general visible appearance and its place in the webpage are the same as the summary ones. It takes up some more space in the webpage due to the number of dynamic lists, which can be opened by using it.
In both, the summary and the library, the act of searching is performed by selecting words offered by rolling list options. In any case the user does not need to write anything. When the search has finished the results are presented at the same place where the library is. The user can look up the results by clicking on each one of them, and open them in the main browser's window. When the user is opening the content pages resulting from a search, he/she does not lose either the results list itself, which remains at the bottom of the window, nor the configuration of the library.

IV. THE INTEGRATION SET UP

After to show what the head and the library are, we want to present how both elements must be joined in order to be used together. We will describe it first from the point of view of the user-teacher, and after from the user-student point of view. In both cases the essential is that some elements of the set remain unaltered in their general aspect. The infrastructure always offers the same functionality and adapts it in each specific situation depending on the content page.

From the user-teacher point of view

Suppose that the teacher wants to prepare some material to introduce students in a specific topic, i.e. electrostatics. The teacher can use the library to select and collect material that is in la baldufa server: theory contents, auto-evaluation questions, problems, and proposed activities. Besides of this she/he can also search classified websites including material that is not located in la baldufa server. By using the library the teacher can find all this material, collect the results in the same page and reedit this page in order to personalise it.
The steps are the followings:
a) Use the library to select from the local server specific material: level of difficulty (say 18yr), kind of content (say theory, applets...) and topic (electromagnetism/ electrostatics).
b) Collect the results into a new window, which is a library interface option.
c) If more material is needed, back to the library and repeat the process.
d) Accumulate the results into the previous window.
e) Use again the library to find material from the www. Only preselected material will be offered. Accumulate the results into the previous window.
f) Use a search engine (Google, Yahoo...) to find other material not found in the library.
g) Analyse the resulting new window's webpage. Use any html editor (Front-Page, Dreamweaver...) to edit it. Eliminate non-desired material.
h) Add comments, graphics, other links...etc. in the webpage. Divide the constructed html file into different files if necessary. Don't worry about internal navigability. Use anchors to locate the different items.
i) If you want to use an applet coming from placed in the local server, don't worry, insert a link to it as usual. Concentrate your efforts to communicate, stimulate, guide... your students.
j) Publish the resultant page into your website, linking it from your home page.

We want emphasise that:
" The teacher is capable of preparing his web-based material avoiding technical problems (in Fig. 3 you can see an example of this point).
" Teachers can put together their efforts by sharing material. With the purpose of sharing material with other colleagues it is important that their contents being distributed through short html pages.
" The material elaborated becomes a content page and, after an accurate cataloguing process, it can be used in a situation different of the original one.

From the user-student point of view

The student will see the page offered by his/her teacher surrounded by both elements: the head and the library. He/she will be able to use these elements to navigate through the webpage. If the student needs a graphical calculator the head will offer it to her/him. If she/he needs more practice or information of some topic she/he can use the library to find preselected contents that can be of his/her interest. In this way we avoid confusing students attempting to find something among thousand of pages offered by a standard search engine.
Students look at the content webpage using a standard browser, therefore they are free to navigate into www and are not locked in the web space of his/her teacher. However they have to consider that the main characteristics of local user material is that it has passed a sort of quality control managed la baldufa .

V. EDUCATIONAL WEBSITE vs. VIRTUAL CAMPUS

After considering our proposal of web infrastructure we want point out some considerations about other known academic web platforms, which are currently used. At the moment, most universities have their own Virtual Campus. Usually it includes, besides the pure institutional information pages, a restricted area where it supposes to be located educational contents and tools for students and teachers. Login on into this area, the user-teacher or the user student, has the possibility to use either a commercial educational platform (webCT [9], blackboard [10],..), or a web environment designed, constructed and monitored by the corresponding University Technical Service.
Obviously, it is not possible to analyse all the possibilities that this kind of intranets can offer, but they have some similar features among them. With the aim to notice some differences between our educational website and Virtual Campus platforms, in this section we want to focus our attention to our University (UPC) Virtual Campus. In spite of this is a particular case, we guess it can be useful.
The UPC Virtual Campus is an intranet where teachers and students could find tools and contents, which are supposed to be useful for teaching and/or learning some specific subject. It is composed by a collection of subject intranets. For each subject intranet a teacher is responsible of its web space. There, the student could find a schedule of the classroom lectures, the syllabus subject, an agenda, and tools to communicate with the teacher and/or other students (i.e. a discussion forum) (see Fig.5). The system allows the teachers to hang documents and links to other sites referring to the subject.
There are no tools to edit or to make it easy to edit html documents with graphics and equations.
The library is nothing but a list of references. The intranet contents are not catalogued therefore is not possible to find, after a searching process, specific material (problems questions...).

The web space is restricted into the intranet area, and the contents are not shared among the teachers.
These objections to the Virtual Campus do not invalidate it. We think that our proposal of website infrastructure could act as a complement of the Virtual Campus. Whereas the Virtual Campus can be understood as the building of our educational environment, and the subject intranets as the classrooms, the educational website is related with the activity developed inside the classroom. Our proposal pretend to be close to the everyday task of teachers and students giving them tools to make easy the use of Internet as educational resource.

VI. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

In the previous sections we have presented an educational website infrastructure, that gives the teacher a friendly web environment to use the web with a teaching/learning purpose. It's a proposal that we have already implemented and we are using in different ways:
" To manage contents of a specific subject in order to be used as complementary material. The teaching mode is still the "chalk and talk" one.
" As a tool to help the navigation through the contents of Fundamental Optics. We teach this subject in a semi-distance way.

The next step must be to design a research strategy in order to investigate the use of our website as a way to increase the meaningful learning in an specific subject, and which are the most suitable teaching strategies to achieve it. During the last five years a great amount of educational proposals based in the use of Internet have been appearing [11,12], but there is still a lack of research about what are the benefits in the learning process using the new environments and tools.
With regard to the website components, we are working on the development of tools to promote the interaction among the persons involved in the learning process in order to foster the participation and the collaborative work. We plan to incorporate tools for asynchronous discussion (discussion forum) and on-line communication (chat). Setting up both tools is not the main problem, in fact there are lots of shareware software that it is easy to adapt to be incorporated in a specific server [13]. The big problem, and of course one of the most interesting in educational research, is to know which is the way that such sort of communication tools must be utilised in order that they contribute as a positive element to improve the teaching and learning processes.

VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

X.Jaén would like to thank the Comisión Asesora de Investigación Científica y Técnica for partial financial support, under Contract No. BFM2000-0604 and also the Laboratori de Física Matemàtica of the Societat Catalana de Física for partial financial support.
The authors would like to thank the Departament d'Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació (DURSI), de la Generalitat de Catalunya for partial finantial support.

VIII. REFERENCES

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