Building Web Content at the Topic Level for a Course in Information Technology for Caribbean High Schools

The building of web content for students at the high school level needs to be well structured to ensure quality. The structuring takes place through a decomposition process. This decomposition occurs at the topic/lesson level during which instructional materials are built for each topic according to a template consisting of six components Review, Focus, Estimated Completion Time, Objectives, Presentation of Content, and Assessment. The template provides a layout to be used as a standard so that instructors can quickly become familiar with the steps and processes necessary for structuring course materials. The template or framework provides a means whereby the learner is encouraged to remain focused on the topic at hand. For example, the Presentation of Content does not include the detailed instructional materials for the lesson but only highlights the main points. A link on that page gives access to the detailed instructional materials. With the development of each topic the Web course will eventually become selfcontained in that it will contain all the required content and, as such, a textbook will only be used only as supplementary reading. The components of the topic/lesson framework are described in this paper. ______________________________________________________________________________