Authoring ODL educational material for the Web

Abstract

This paper discusses some critical issues for writing educational material for Open and Distance Learning (ODL) to be posted on the Web. ODL material is interaction-oriented; so is the Web. In addition, the Web offers some unique characterics which, when taken into account, will offer significal advantages to the educational material of ODL. This is important for authoring material in digital format for the Web, right from the beginning, as well as, for transferring to the Web existing material written in traditional format (i.e., print). There is a number of pedagogical as well as technological disciplines which must be taken into account. These are: the principles of ODL educational material authoring; the principles of composition and presentation of an ODL porftolio; measurements concerning online reader's behaviour; web usability rules; metadata tagging schemes for automatic processing by computers, and learning styles. This paper is initially based on a theoretical discussion and brings forth some important, practical guidelines for authoring ODL educational material for the Web, in order to improve the learning outcome.