This publication is reproduced with the kind permission of Kogan Page publishers.
Innovations in Education and Training International (IETI)
32,3 229-238 (August 1995)
MULTIMEDIA DELIVERY OF COASTAL ZONE MANAGEMENT TRAINING
M.J. Clark, J.H. Ball and J.D. Sadler, GeoData Institute, University of Southampton, UK
SUMMARY
A coastal zone (CZM) multimedia software training module has been custom written by the GeoData Institute at the University of Southampton for an environmental management second year undergraduate course. The materials are structured into three units, coastal zone environmental management, oil spill model and contingency plans, and a cost benefit analysis of sea defence options for Chesil Beach in Dorset. The software comprises a PC Windows 3.1 application developed using Microsoft Visual Basic which provides a front end to some of the services provided by the Microcosm open hypermedia system.
1. A CONTEXT FOR THE COURSE MULTIMEDIA APPROACH
The incentive to develop interactive multimedia course modules derives from the urgent practical need to deliver high quality teaching to increasingly large classes, and the separate but reinforcing pressure to provide students with high level transferable skills amongst which the mastery of information technology usually ranks high. The capability of multimedia systems to offer many students simultaneous access to large volumes of teaching materials is a basic but nevertheless very valuable bonus of such approaches. Given this co-incidence of practical, intellectual and resource-based advantages, it is apparent that multimedia approaches will become attractive provided that the attendant challenges of providing such courses quickly and cost-effectively can be met.
The fully implemented multimedia example described below was developed by the GeoData Institute for teaching Coastal Zone Management (CZM) to over 180 Environmental Management second year undergraduates within Physical Geography courses. The three modules (text, spreadsheet and model), which are PC-based and run under Microsoft Windows, use multimedia services provided by the open hypermedia system Microcosm (Figure 1). Using the application, students have on-line access to a large number of recent CZM publications and supporting materials. They are able to interrogate them using content-based retrieval methods, and copy sections from the texts for incorporation into their own documents. The courseware encourages students to use the CZM application to gain an overall awareness of the relevant aspects of coastal zone science, and apply that knowledge using the custom-built task-based tutorials which are also incorporated into the application.
The course modules developed offer a "paper-free environment" within which all the necessary information (including assignment instructions and "help" facilities) is presented within the software application. This resource includes all multimedia documents, course notes, practical handouts, evaluation questionnaires and any other information provided as the course progresses. All work compiled by the students is written in the application environment and stored on their own (disk) media, with the ultimate intention of electronic submission of results.
In practice, the provision of effective multimedia teaching of this type is based upon the convergence of five fundamental activities, which are further discussed below:
· The identification of substantive course content which is amenable to delivery in this mode.
· The assembly and capture of the required materials.
· The design and implementation of a hardware/software delivery vehicle.
· The design and authoring of courseware incorporating the chosen delivery structure.
· The availability of a suitable teaching delivery environment.
2. SPECIFYING COURSE AIMS, OBJECTIVES AND CONTENT
The Environmental Management course within which the multimedia modules were presented has several characteristics which render it particularly well-suited to such a delivery mode, and it is not surprising that environmental management has been a field within which such technologies have been developed over several years (Simmons et al.,, 1992). It provides an awareness of the aims, constraints and techniques of practical environmental management in as far as these are related to physical geography, touching on a range of environmental subsystems, but concentrating on water management and associated "holistic" topics. The student audience is highly varied in level (second and third year undergraduates, plus Masters students) and disciplinary background (archaeologists, geographers, geologists, environmental scientists and oceanographers). An eclectic approach is essential, and it is basic to the philosophy of the course that it aims to provide students with an introductory awareness of the two fundamental components of the environmental management system:
· The issues faced by environmental managers and the structures of response adopted by them. Such discussions are by nature general, and draw upon a range of socio-economic/political inputs as well as physical geography. Effective management is impossible without a firm awareness of the broad ramifications of the management process, which requires access to a wide range of information sources.
· The techniques used to support management decision-making: in particular, it is necessary for students to be aware of the data-handling and analytical requirements of the decision-making process, and to experience the extent to which the techniques in a particular context can determine the management response adopted.
Management is a fusion of information, analysis, judgement and action, and these are difficult skills to transfer without some form of simulation environment. The objectives of the course thus centre upon the expectation that students will acquire an overall appreciation of the component items which combine to create the environmental management process in the UK, and should have an awareness of the international context within which this system has emerged. The course should also ensure that students become aware of the interplay between environmental management and environmental science, and will appreciate the significant role played by data handling and analytical techniques in the design and testing of practical management strategies. It is within this core context that the use of interactive multimedia can be highly effective both in providing learning material and in setting up a data-manipulative and decision-making environment. The USIS (Usable Spatial Information Systems) project noted that training courses were generally regarded as unrealistic in that they related poorly to real-world professional (personal) experience, as well as neglecting both novice users and those intending to perform decision support-tasks (Davies and Medyckyj-Scott, 1993). The courseware here described was designed to overcome these specific deficiencies.
Coastal Zone Management is a central element of environmental management, and typifies the relevance of an information-handling focus in teaching such topics. The field demands assimilation of a wide range of text, graphic, image (static and moving) and numerical information, and generally requires these to be synthesised if it is to provide understanding and design management response. The course objectives thus provide for this skill assimilation, part of which is embodied in the multimedia units. So great and varied is the information base involved, that it is becoming the practice for professional coastal zone managers to employ complex information-handling systems, and this provides a vocational addition to the list of incentives for adopting such an approach in teaching (Bartlett, 1994: MAFF, 1994).
In the first phase of courseware development, a sequence of three skill-based modules was devised, each occupying one week of the course. Basic fluency manipulating text documents was assumed to be the initial requirement, particularly in performing word searches using the Microcosm Compute Links facility, though in practice this was preceded for many students by the need to master even more basic PC Windows system skills. The ability to integrate numerical data handling with associated text document query was approached in a second module, using the example of a spreadsheet analysis of cost-benefit data for a set of alternative coastal flooding defence strategies, thus rooting the system skills firmly in the context of a real management problem. The third and final stage in the sequence added real-time modelling (an oil spill scenario) to the simultaneous reference to spreadsheet data and supporting text documents, thereby simulating complex professional management use of information systems.
By relating the three modules in a sequence, each building on the former, the delivery was made self-reinforcing and yielded a good level of mastery despite the limited three-week duration of the course component. The three stages relate closely to the progression from commitment, through confidence to understanding that was postulated by Clark (1991) as the basis for designing a sequence of GIS training experiences for technological non-specialists. The architecture of the modules also satisfies Tinker's (1992) suggestion that student learning with geographic computer-based systems was enhanced by personalization (use of data which apply to the experience of the student), interactivity (learning is enhanced by actions which make the system appear less abstract and more responsive to the individual) and multiple representation (viewing data from multiple perspectives helps learning).
3. ASSEMBLY AND CAPTURE OF SOURCE MATERIAL
The success of any information system is ultimately limited by the range and quality of its contents. Since the aim of CZM courseware was to invite users to explore the field widely, it was necessary to assemble far more than just a nominal set of information products. Thus the core of the CZM application is a substantial collection of multimedia documents relevant to coastal zone management, including:
· a large volume of text files (around 2000 pages)
· bitmap images (30MB)
· video clips (4 minutes, 10MB)
· spreadsheets preloaded with coastal zone economic data
· Microcosm devices such as Mimics (guided tours of other documents)
Many of the documents were scanned from original printed materials and converted to text files using OCR (optical character recognition) software, supported by limited manual file editing. The bitmap images include colour and black and white photographs, diagrams, tables, maps and aerial photographs, which were also captured by scanning. The video clips were converted from standard VHS into Video for Windows (AVI) format suitable for displaying on standard Windows PCs. All of the documents, including information written specifically for the course such as on-line help and tutorial instructions, are incorporated as a single Microcosm application. Students are able, through the services provided by Microcosm, to access and query documents, and copy sections of text for pasting into their own work.
Great care was taken to acquire formal clearance for the capture and subsequent use of material from the rights owners. This was a time-consuming though productive process, since there was a surprising but gratifying degree of co-operation which meant that a substantial information source was built without any liability for rights payments.
4. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A HARDWARE/SOFTWARE DELIVERY SYSTEM
The CZM application software comprises a Windows 3.1 custom-written application interfaced with Microcosm. The custom application was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic (v3.0 Professional Edition), and provides an easy to use and structured front-end which gives entry to all the component applications utilised, mainly the multimedia services provided by Microcosm (document query, spreadsheet, model) (Figure 1). It is estimated that the total amount of time to develop the CZM application, including collating and scanning documents, multimedia authoring, course preparation, software development and installation, amounted to 6-8 weeks of work for two full-time developers.
Users of the application are able to access the multimedia documents either through the custom software (Figure 2) or by interacting directly with Microcosm. This design allows students with computing expertise ranging from minimal exposure to Windows or PCs (still a significant proportion of undergraduates) up to a fairly high level of competence, to explore the full range of available facilities. As the course progressed, the confidence of the less-experienced students grew rapidly, as did their enthusiasm after an initial lapse, and they were soon able to exploit all the resources.
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The three components of the CZM module accessed through
Microcosm via a Visual Basic front end.
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Microcosm itself is an Open Hypermedia System developed by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton (Davis et al., 1992). It is increasingly being used within UK Universities as a framework for the implementation and dissemination of courseware. Microcosm allows users to browse and query large (read-only) multimedia collections using powerful Hypermedia navigation techniques. It also provides many unique and flexible facilities for multimedia interaction with its open filter-based model and tools for content based retrieval. The ability of Microcosm to launch any application for presenting all types of documents removes much of the burden of courseware development (Figures 3 & 4). For example, the spreadsheet application available in the CZM user environment was different to the one used during the development phase. This procedural modification was handled with a simple change in the Microcosm configuration, and no code alteration was necessary. Another fundamental design concept of Microcosm is the ability to manage all hypertext mark-up information separately from the multimedia source documents. This allows the author of the CZM courseware to store the text documents in their raw form, and create hypertext buttons for access to diagrams and figures which were held in separate graphical format.
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The visual basic front end to the coastal resources with a microcosm
launched keyword search.
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A facility which proved particularly useful during course delivery was the Compute Links text search feature used to locate documents, paragraphs or sentences similar to a user specified word or group of words such as "cost benefit analysis" or "oil spill". This facility was introduced as part of the course sessions, and was used extensively by the students in their subsequent course assignments. The facility was found especially useful because the application integrates a large number of documents, none of which are indexed or have extensive contents pages. An extension to this facility, also beneficial to the students, was the ability to copy the entire results of a Compute Links text search to the Windows clipboard. From here, all matching sentences or paragraphs could be examined or transferred to other applications (such as a word processor) without the need to enter each containing document.
Version 2 of Microcosm was used for the CZM application, being the most up-to-date then supported in the Southampton University Campus Network environment. Since this course delivery date, a significantly improved Version 3.0 has been released as the first commercially-available version of the product. Migration of the CZM application is planned for future delivery in this environment, and will also allow the exploitation of new features such as the more highly-structured facility for document selection and a Rich Text Format (RTF) viewer.
5. Design and authoring of courseware
Providing a customised interface to the large and varied resource base used for the CZM courseware gained numerous advantages. The custom application was developed with a simple and consistent user interface giving single window access to all of the component facilities. It was designed to be visually pleasing, very simple for novice users to operate, and structured around the content of the course (specified as an output from the initial definition of the course aims). The opening window presents the students with many sources of initial help, course tutorial instructions, direct access to specific Microcosm services, access to the individual tutorials, a facility for completing the course questionnaire, and a quick method of launching a text editor for their own work. On selecting a particular tutorial, a new window is opened presenting all relevant resources in a structured way. This might include a list of relevant texts, access to important images, video and simulation models, with associated spreadsheet data.
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Output from the oil spill model after 73 hours of elapsed time
Spreadsheet display of numerical data from the oil spill model
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Initial course delivery plans overestimated the level of computer experience of the users. It emerged that most of the students taking the course had very limited computing skills, and many had no exposure to PCs or Windows at all. The use of a custom written interface allowed the students to navigate the course, while retaining full access to the facilities of Microcosm. Initially, students were given detailed instructions on carrying out specific operations, and thereafter gradually introduced to the more complex facilities of Microcosm. Once the students had mastered the basics of operating in the Windows environment and manipulating multimedia documents and hypertext navigation, they could choose to interact with the customised front-end or access Microcosm directly. The availability of a Microcosm API (application programming interface) through Visual Basic means that all multimedia documents need only be "registered" once - there is no need to replicate this process within the custom application. Any Microcosm service can then be utilised from the custom application without concern for the document or viewer type, or implementation techniques involved. This is a very significant advantage of the Microcosm approach, making courseware development more rapid and more flexible.
In retrospect, it is clear that the course design process passed through three phases, each dominated by different perspectives and yielding distinct responses:
· The aspiration phase equating to the decision to go ahead and the search for funding was characterised by a focus on principles rather than practice. The targets for the modules were defined in abstract but were articulated as being the enhancement of judgement and motivation, and at this stage the technology was seen merely as a vehicle for the curriculum demands. It was recognised that learner skill would be important, but assumed that it would be forthcoming.
· The prospect phase marked active courseware development in the weeks running up to the first implementation of the course, by which point practical scope and limitation were clearly apparent so that the perspective was dominated by system and data. The targets had become more pragmatic: to provide the students with effective access to a rich information resource base, and to do so on time. Technology in prospect appeared increasingly to be a traffic jam rather than a vehicle, and user skills were still simply taken for granted.
· The delivery phase represented real-time experience of the course as it was delivered and adapted. Suddenly, technology opened up the information (super-) highway: networked delivery of the modules to up to 100 students simultaneously was achieved without a significant hitch. Equally suddenly, the real traffic jam was seen to be student system skills, which rapidly became the main barrier to success, and thus the main focus of remedial effort. Once this hurdle had been overcome, the course targets were again raised to include enhanced judgement, skill and motivation - and were essentially achieved.
6. THE TEACHING DELIVERY ENVIRONMENT
Using the university Campus Network and public workstation clusters, the courseware was made accessible to the students simultaneously at over 100 Windows PCs in three locations around the campus. The application and associated materials, amounting to some 50MB, were downloaded to a single server in each location, allowing all software and data to be delivered to the workstations in a read-only mode. No specialised or additional hardware or software was necessary to run the application (Microcosm was already loaded on the servers) The workstations used were standard 486DX PCs with 8MB of memory and 14" or 15" Super-VGA monitors. The network operating system was Novell NetWare using standard ethernet cable (10 BaseT) to connect the workstations and servers. Network printing facilities were also available.
Each module was introduced to the students (split into two groups of approximately 90 students each) within the workstation cluster room. The CZM aim was first explained - for example, to design the most cost-effective engineered response strategy for a coastal flooding problem, or to monitor an oil spill simulation and identify the effect of changing wind direction on spill behaviour and thus response strategy choice. Against this context, the specific computation skills were introduced, and students were then encouraged to sample the tasks under the supervision of a member of teaching staff and three technical demonstrators. Subsequent completion of the week's course assignment was undertaken at a time chosen by the individual student using open access workstations.
It was apparent that during the first module, almost all of the questions asked by students concerned system operation (how can I print this?), whereas by the third week the majority of questions related to coastal zone science (why is the oil spill doing that?). This growth in skill and confidence matched the course aims, but was not easily won. The obvious system skills deficiencies of many of the students were remedied by introducing weekly drop-in clinics in a lecture-theatre setting, using large-screen projection to demonstrate a stand-alone version of the CZM system to answer any system operation query raised by the students. Although designed specifically to cater for system skills, these sessions in fact devoted equal attention to the underlying coastal zone science, and established the kind of "conversational" explanatory/reinforcing model proposed by Laurillard (1993) and supported by Draper et al., (1994). The progress thus achieved was further reinforced by referring students back to the information system to read references relating to later lectures in the course, and the main assessed course assignment was also redesigned to require access to the system. Student response indicated that although this repeated drip-feed approach was not necessarily popular at the time, it was effective in consolidating some extremely valuable general (system) and specific (CZM) skills.
7. IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEMS OVERCOME
During the development and delivery of the course materials, a variety of challenges were faced and, for the most part, overcome. Some of the more significant pressure points have already been introduced above. Many of the documents used in the application were produced by government departments such as the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), or private Consultancies. In each case, permission had to be obtained from the rights owner for their use in digital form. Organisations were, in practice, prepared to allow the incorporation of their materials, provided that use was strictly for educational purposes, that delivery was restricted to the single institution, that appropriate acknowledgement and warnings were included, and that documents were not printed out in their entirety.
Capture and quality assurance of documents by scanning was a long process involving three stages: the actual scanning, extensive editing to eradicate mistakes introduced during optical character recognition, and processing of tables and diagrams. It is hoped that these limitations will be overcome in future projects as scanning and recognition software improves. It is also apparent that as the electronic publishing environment evolves, more materials will be made available from their source in digital format. The relatively large storage volume taken up by the video clips and bitmaps limits the quantity and quality of materials which can reasonably be included and delivered to a large number of students in a network environment. Again, it is hoped that as media costs continue to fall and network bandwidth increases, this will be less of a problem.
Some technical limitations were encountered using Microcosm, such as being unable to display formatted text and difficulties moving the document database between the development and user environments. Many of these will be overcome when Version 3.0 of Microcosm is used. It has already been stressed that a large number of the students had little or no previous experience with PCs. Many of them, when initially faced with Windows, the CZM custom application and Microcosm simultaneously, were understandably overwhelmed by so many new concepts and felt unable to motivate themselves. However, with guided Windows tutorials, extra on-line help documentation and dedicated novice sessions, they were soon able to use the application enthusiastically.
8. FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES
The CZM application is now being migrated to Microcosm Version 3.0, and at the same time a new initiative is underway to implement a range of enhancements. Extension and transformation of existing Geographic Information System (GIS) training materials to produce an interactive course module multimedia presentation system is under way. This would use the same essential components as the CZM application, would integrate multimedia documents with specially constructed models, and would include a full-scale GIS simulation. These materials will be used both in MSc training programmes and in professional short courses.
Attention is being devoted to the investigation and development of new methods for distributing multimedia training materials. These will include distribution using CD-ROM and delivery over the Internet using the WWW. Such initiatives are an essential precursor to distance delivery, and offer a realistic basis for transferring access across Europe or even further afield.
Migration of the multimedia training materials to a UNIX platform is under consideration. It is envisaged that this operating environment would present challenges to the rapid development of easy-to-use teaching materials, but would offer much potential for the management of large numbers of users and the efficient distribution of extensive volumes of data over computer networks.
9. A MULTIMEDIA PERSPECTIVE
This project has demonstrated that the use of open hypermedia systems such as Microcosm, coupled with a high level development language (e.g. Visual Basic), can be used to create a powerful and exciting environment for teaching and learning. Such a setup also provides a very effective set of tools for disseminating a limited set of resources to a large group of people. Careful use of modern technology such as multimedia and OCR software can, in a relatively short development and authoring time, produce innovative teaching materials.
Many of the advantages accrue to the "open" design of Microcosm. This facilitated the integration of a variety of applications and media types into a single learning tool modelled on the requirements of the Coastal Zone Management course. Powerful content-based retrieval techniques implemented by Microcosm provided very effective mechanisms for gleaning specific information from a large resource pool.
The student response for the computing element of the course was evaluated within the CZM application using an on-screen questionnaire. Feedback has been generally encouraging with most students feeling that they had gained much from this method of learning. Some specific comments were: "I have entered the computer age, this package has been without a doubt the most important skill I have learnt in the last few years", "The package is easy to use and fun", "We do not have to fight for books", "We need an increase in the availability of machines" (despite the fact that there were already 100 accessible, many available from 8.30am to 10pm!). Overall, participating students were motivated to learn about many up-to-date computing techniques, encouraging them to explore their own subject in a more realistic way than is possible within the structure of a conventional lecture. Skills were introduced which, for many, will be commonplace in the future despite the steep learning curve of the present.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding for this project, which was provided by the Scholar Project: A Campus Wide Structure for Multimedia Learning, which is an Institutional grant of the TLTP Project funded by the HEFCE. The OSIS oil-spill model output simulated within the application was kindly provided by British Maritime Technology.
REFERENCES
Bartlett, D. (1994) GIS and the coastal zone: Past present and future. The Association for Geographic Information, 3/94, 36pp.
Clark, M.J. (1991) GIS Awareness: the technical and educational challenge, Proceedings of AGI Third National Conference and Exhibition, Birmingham 20-22 November 1991, 3.9.1-3.9.4.
Davies, C. and Medyckyj-Scott, D. (1993) The USIS project: surveying user opinion on user interfaces. In: Harts, J., Ottens, H.F.L. and Scholten, H. (eds.) EGIS `93. Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on GIS, Genoa, Italy, March 29-April 1, 1993, 474-483.
Davis, H., Hall, W., Heath, I., Hill, G. and Wilkins, R. (1992) Towards an Integrated Information Environment with Open Hypermedia. ECHT'92: Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Conference on Hypertext, Milan, Italy, November 30th-December 4th, 1992, 181-190.
Draper, S.W., Brown, M.I., Edgerton, E., Henderson, F.P., McAteer, E., Smith, E.D. and Watt, H.D. (1994) Observing and measuring the performance of educational technology. University of Glasgow, Glasgow.
Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching: a framework for effective use of educational technology. Routledge, London.
MAFF (1994) Guidance on Computerised Coastal Databases: Consultation Draft, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and food, Flood and Coastal Defence Division, 37pp plus appendices.
Simmons D., Hall, W. and Clark, M.J. (1992) The integration and analysis of existing environmental data within a GIS: Some examples using SPANS and OS/2. Integrating GIS with multimedia for site management, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 301-316.
Tinker, R.F. (1992) Mapware: educational applications of Geographic Information Systems, Journal of Science Education and Technology, 1(1), 35-48.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Mike Clark is Professor of Geography at the University of Southampton and Director of the GeoData Institute. His research over two decades has focused on environmental Management, environmental impact, coastal and cold region geomorphology and data handling technologies (specifically airborne and satellite remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems). He has particular interests in innovative teaching technologies and is Chairman of the British University Film and Video Council and former chair of University Teaching Media and Support Services Committee.
Julian Ball is an environmental scientist within the GeoData Institute. Julian specialises in environmental data handling, GIS for field science mapping and analysis, and the development of multimedia training and awareness packages for environmental sciences. He has applied these technologies to increasingly wide fields, including languages, sociology and biomedical science.
Jason Sadler is a research scientist and the systems manager within the GeoData Institute, supporting many areas of the Institute's research. His specific research interests include GIS database models and architectures, and the development of software and multimedia training materials for environmental applications. He is also working for a PhD exploring the application of Open Systems concepts to Geographic Information Systems.
Address for correspondence: GeoData Institute, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ.
GeoData Institute,
Publicationsjds@geodata.soton.ac.uk