Separation of educational and technical content in educational hypermedia

The creation and development of educational hypermedia by teachers and educational staff is often limited by their lack of computing skills, time and support from the educational institutions. Especially the lack of computing skills is a hinderance to most of today¿s educational experts. The problem is to find out how those educational experts could be supported by computer based tools which are tailored especially to their needs without having any technical limitations. In this study the separation of technical and educational content in educational hypermedia is examined as a solution to this problem. The main hypothesis of this study is that the separation of technical and educational content is possible if it is based on a fine-grained structure of different teaching and learning strategies and their conversion into an authoring tool. Such an authoring tool would make the creation of educational hypermedia very easy for teachers and therefore enable them to overcome the existing obstacles. The development of a new model, the creation of a new XML language and the implementation of a new authoring tool form the basis for a detailed investigation. The investigation was done by undertaking several research tasks like the evaluation of the XML language and the authoring tool by a group of educational experts of different knowledge domains, the practical usage of the authoring tool for the creation of real-life based educational material and the analysis of the gained research results.