Draft 1, Begun: 10.08.15, As of: 10.08.15
Most instructors and authors of instructional materials are used to using a word-processor program, 20+ years since the 1980 advent of the desktop computer and "personal" and "office" productivity software.
The web-publishing version of word-processing has been a several step process for 15+ years (since about 1995 in the USA):
- Word-process the material you wish to print-publish (on paper) and web-publish (as web pages) for use of the students in your class.
- Save the the finished version as the normal word-processing file format ready for printing on paper.
- Save again (i.e. use the "save-as" command) to save the finished version as web pages, i.e. to save the file as one big file or many small files with the file extension: ".html" . Since 2000 many authros have saved their files in ONE FILE format: PDF. And this file format can be used for both printing on paper and for display online as a kind-of web page.
- Email or otherwise transfer the "html" files (or pdf file) to your web site's "web master" (or maestra, for the women).
- The web master (or maestra) figures out how to put your "html" files (or pdf file) on the web site for your class, does so, and notifies you that your material is ready to proof-read "online" and if ok to let your students use in your classes.
I (JGW) want to suggest that educators who plan to create MORE of their own online material for a class, material such as class readers, other class supplemental readings, guidelines, procedures, etc. plan to prepare two (2) or three (3) versions of the same material as follows:
- a simple version (for tutorials, for 'slower' students); a complicated version (for the C+, B, A, and A+ students)
- beginner, intermediate, and advanced versions
There are several very good technical reasons to have 2-3 versions of the same material. The main one is that they will be useful eventually in computer-assisted human tutoring and in automated (100% computer-generated) intelligent tutoring systems.
- Artificially intelligent "learning programs" can "learn" more subtle and implied methods and meaning from what you are teaching when given several versions of the same material.
- AI programs can learn what you mean by "beginner" terms and concepts, "intermediate" terms and concepts, and so on.
- AI programs can compare what you mean by "beginner", "intermediate", and "advanced" with what other instructors of the same material mean by those terms. The AI learning program then forms a statistical or "fuzzy logic" consensus of the meaning of those "meta terms", beginner, intermediate and advanced.
- Another AI program, a learning materials classification program, can then classify "more accurately" (from the original authors' points of view and from the eventual end-user's point of view) what is "beginner", "intermediate" and "advanced" material for a given subject matter for a given type of student at a certain grade level.
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