Proceedings of ED - TELECOM 96 - VVorld Conference on rational Telecommunications

New WWW technologies allow for integrating distance education power of WWW with interactivity and intelligence. Integrating on-line presentation of learning materials with the interactivity of problem solving environments and the intelligence of intelligent tutoring systems results in a new quality of learning materials that we call 13_ textbooks. In this paper, we describe the development of ELM-ART, an I 3 -textbook for learning programming that can be accessed via Internet and that is based on the on-site learning environment ELM-PE. Distance learning with Internet opens new ways of learning for many people. Now, educational programs and learning materials installed and supported in one place can be used by thousands of students from all over the world. World Wide Web (WWW) and WWW browsers provide a good example of powerful modern Internet facilities. Using WWW, a novice user can comfortably browse the Internet finding required pieces of information in different locations worldwide. From the very early days of WWW, there were many trials to use WWW facilities for distance learning. Being a good general tool for Internet navigation, however, WWW and current WWW browsers are not specially designed for distance education. Thus, most existing educational WWW applications use only simple solutions and are much weaker and more restricted than existing 'on-site' educational systems and tools. A number of powerful technologies which proved to be very effective in 'on-site' education are still not implemented within the WWW framework. Two advanced educational technologies are of special interest to us: interactive hypermedia textbooks and intelligent tutoring systems. A prominent goal of the project we are working at is to integrate `distance education' power of WWW with interactivity and intelligence offered by these advanced technologies. From Simple Electronic Textbooks to Interactive Intelligent Textbooks In the pre-computer society, a school or a university textbook used to be the primary learning support medium both in the classroom and at home. It is not surprising that several generations of researchers on computer use in education considered a textbook as a model for developing computer-based learning support tools. What is surprising is that a very big part of developed `electronic textbooks' are no more than `electronic copies' of printed textbooks: they offer the learner nothing more than access to the textbook content. Technically, current electronic textbooks (ET) are much better than their grandparents: first ETs used expensive mainframes and represented only text. CRT displays added graphics, personal computers made them cheap and available, multimedia technology added the possibility to present sound, video, and animation, and, now, Internet and World Wide Web bring the possibility of distance access. From the conceptual point of view, however, most ETs that are currently available on the WWW offer the student not much more than good printed textbooks that are available nowadays. Advanced research on computer use in education showed that computers can be a much better learning support medium. To see the difference let us limit ourselves to programming language textbooks. Traditional printed textbooks give hierarchically structured presentations of programming language concepts and constructs. In addition to the presentation of concepts, good textbooks use a lot of examples-from simple expressions to complete programs-and exercises-from simple tests to programming problems. Simple electronic textbooks just serve the same information on-line, sometimes with use of simple hypertext technology. Two important features, interactivity and intelligence, can be added in more advanced systems.