The University of Hagen (FernUniversität Hagen) is in a unique position in Germany, since it is the only distance teaching university in the German-speaking countries and regions. The university is an integral part of the standard public higher education structure and offers German degrees in the fields of economics, law, human science, computer science, mathematics and electrical and information engineering. The students receive the printed course material in a two-week rhythm and have to pass assignments before being admitted to final examinations. The university has built an infrastructure of study centres throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Eastern Europe, where students can meet their tutors and have access to small libraries, computers and video conferencing equipment. Apart from the distance part of their courses, the students have to spend several days in Hagen attending seminars, laboratories and oral examinations.

The FernUniversität is determined to make best use of the vast possibilities which are offered by information technology and the new media. Diverse projects are underway at the university to evaluate the route from the traditional university for distance teaching towards a new media university. During the recent years, the university has integrated its faculties and central institutions into a concept called Education and Knowledge Space: Virtual University. This concept aims at completely representing the university and its services in the virtual space provided by the Internet. To achieve this goal several internally funded projects have been carried out which target aspects of e-learning content, services and infrastructure.

The learning content management system FuXML [FuXML] described in this paper is one of these projects and was funded during 2002 and 2003. The project was conducted by the Department of Computer Science I, the Department of Communication Systems, and the university’s media centre, the ZFE (Centre for the Development of Distance Teaching).

The FernUniversität Hagen has a long tradition of employing various kinds of media in addition to the printed course material. Media design is thus of high importance within the concept of the virtual learning space. Teachers who wish to make use of hypermedia content in their courses are supported by the ZFE. The assistance offered ranges from specific course design for visually impaired students to the production of TV programmes on specific academic topics.

The content creation process at the FernUniversität has not been standardised yet. Although guidelines and style guides were created by the ZFE in the past, their application is not mandatory and teachers are free to use any approach which suits them best. Most courses at the FernUniversität only exist as printed material created with standard word-processing and type-setting software such as Microsoft Word and LaTeX. There are also some courses which are not printed on paper but are published as CBT courses on CD ROM. Generally these are results from specially funded multimedia course development projects.

With the advent of the Internet in public life during the last decade, the advantages of the new Internet services for distance teaching and learning soon became undisputed. The possibilities offered by hypertext and hypermedia obviously have great potential with regard to new pedagogical models. The new electronic communication techniques such as videoconferencing, chat, email and newsgroups were expected to greatly enhance the contact between students and their teachers.

However, the expectation that e-learning would quickly revolutionise the way students learn has not been fulfilled to the extent predicted a few years ago. While it is possible to develop web-based hypermedia course material within individually financed projects, it is not realistic to expect similar developments for all university course material when the financial resources available are considered. The FernUniversität currently offers 1600 courses. It is not economically feasible to spend the amount of money usually required to create high quality hypermedia material for each of these courses. Teaching experience also shows that while students happily accept the provided hypermedia content as additional material, it does not provide a satisfactory replacement for the printed course. Currently there are no cross-media publishing systems in use and the maintenance of an online version and a print version which provide identical course content is the responsibility of the faculty staff. This situation is not satisfying and an economically reasonable solution has to be found.

This paper is a report on a specific approach taken by the FernUniversität to implement certain functionalities with regard to the creation and publication of contents within the scope of the university’s learning material production process. These functionalities are commonly assigned to a learning management system. However FuXML is not an exhaustive learning management system, since many further functionalities are implemented in the university’s infrastructure, which builds the complete learning space.

In rest of this paper we will describe the specific solution for cross-media publishing of e-learning contents taken by the FernUniversität. Other recent experiences with regard to design and production of online learning material can be found in [GGMS04] and [KM04].

E-learning is the key-technology that enables what is considered to be one of the most important concepts in the modern information society, namely life-long learning. Therefore it is not only of major significance to the public academic sector but also to enterprises. The business interest in e-learning technologies and the associated investment capital has created a considerable market for e-learning solutions. There is a wealth of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) available on the market. Thus it would seem logical for a university, or any other company, to decide to buy one of the existing commercial solutions instead of developing it´s own . Nevertheless, what appears to be a good decision in theory may prove different in practice. The three main reasons are: firstly, academic institutions and enterprises have different requirements. Secondly, commercial e-learning solution providers do not adapt their products to these requirements, they do merely adapt their marketing strategies. Finally, in the long run, the licence costs for commercial solutions are too high. There are several examples of universities that bought commercial LMS at a time when the competition was strong and the licensing fees were low. Following the withdrawal of some of the weaker competitors from the market, licensing prices suddenly became much higher than at the time of purchase.

Since the FernUniversität is a university for distance teaching, the requirements of a content creation and management system are different to those of conventional universities. The course material is provided in the form of an elaborated textbook which is divided into several course units including exercises and assignments. This stands in contrast to the rather ad hoc nature of lecture material used at conventional universities mostly comprised of sketchy Powerpoint slides and lecture notes. The content creation process must therefore support substantially more options than assembling course modules out of existing presentation slides and PDF documents.

The high level goals the system should meet are:

At the time the FuXML project was started, the market did not offer a LCMS that met the university’s requirements. Apart from basic editorial and multimedia features some other important requirements are:

In the traditional pedagogical concept of the FernUniversität, students use the course material as their textbook and working material. The course text is enriched with didactical elements such as learning objectives, summaries, prerequisites, examples, comments, etc. The text is based on basic principles regarding structure and format which have been established especially for distance learning materials. Typography and design are chosen to reflect certain pedagogical goals. Hence, although detailed mandatory style guides do not exist, all courses must abide to a minimal common quality standard.

This didactical methodical and design-oriented course profile has proven itself over many years. The basic principles of traditional course development are also applied to the courses in the Virtual University. Although completely new pedagogical models can be realized in modern e-learning environments, this was not the goal of the FuXML project. The project’s emphasis was based more on establishing economical work processes rather than on introducing novel didactical concepts in the distance learning approach of the FernUniversität. Today, this rather conventional approach seems to have been the right choice. Slipping in new methods of teaching through the backdoor of technology without organisational incentive and support might not be the correct procedure. The adoption of new working methods based on the structured editing of XML course documents already presents a barrier to untrained academic staff that should not be underestimated. The target user group does not consist of euphoric media and computer experts who love to use fancy e-learning tools for daily enjoyment, but are pragmatic academic employees that are interested in software tools that deliver efficient solutions for their work. Acceptance of the system would have been very low, if extensive training towards new pedagogical methods had been necessary and existing didactically structured material could not have been directly imported into the new system.

As a result of this, FuXML was first applied to existing courses which employ the traditional didactical concepts of the FernUniversität and are imported into the system. Even a simple imported electronic course without any hypermedia features provides added value to students because of its online availability and digital versatility. Visually impaired students have always been a target group of the FernUniversität but require specially prepared material. The cross-media production process of FuXML can be extended to provide an electronic version of each course that can be processed by Braille screen readers in the future. The HTML screen version produced by FuXML conforms to the accessibility guidelines of the W3 consortium and the German directive to ensure accessibility without barriers (”Barrierefreiheit”). One of the advantages of online digital courses is the inexpensive supply of ”demo” material for prospective new students. Parts of regular courses can be made public to offer a first insight into typical university courses for those who are interested in studying but undecided on whether to enrol or not. An even more radical step would be to follow in the footsteps of the MIT, who made their complete course material freely available to the public in their OpenCourseWare project [OCW].

The digital online courses can be ”enhanced” in several steps to provide added value to the students. In the first step, the extensive application of hypertext mechanisms by linking the course material is an inexpensive way of introducing an extra quality into the course. This includes linking of contents and special directories like index, glossary, list of abbreviations, etc. Some of the linking can be automated by the system to relieve the author as much as possible from this tedious task. Many students will still use the printed version of a course for the first reading. A hypertext course can be used by a student in a later phase to recapitulate important concepts and find keywords, definitions, interesting figures quickly, indeed everything the author might consider worthy of indexing. Furthermore, learning objectives and summaries can be easily accessed for every course unit which helps students to get a quick overview of the course’s main goals and achievements. The didactical markup provided by the author helps to visually pronounce important concepts and improve the attractiveness of the course. Pleasant visual design may also lead students to preferring the screen version over the printed version, even if no further multimedia contents are available.

The integration of multimedia elements such as animations, videos and simulations into the course material is the second step that can be taken to improve the quality of the original course. However, the costs introduced with this step are considerably higher than those attributed to hypertext features. If high quality is demanded, professional support by media experts is required. Care must be taken with regard to the selected media formats. Open standardised formats are better suited than proprietary formats since the latter are often changed with the products they are created with and carry the risk that they cannot be accessed by modern versions of the authoring software even after only a few years. The annoying experience that expensive multimedia content, which is still appealing, cannot be reused due to technical inaccessibility has already been made with CDROM courses that were created in the early years of the last decade.

While technology should not be the main motivating factor for working on a new e-learning project, choosing a wrong technological approach will have severe impacts on the practical utility of the project’s results.

For FuXML the following technological decisions were made in the inception phase of the project:

The following diagram presents an overview of the system architecture.

Figure 1 - System overview

The component architecture and the use of standard protocols facilitate development and maintenance. To support the heterogeneity of the IT-infrastructure at the FernUniversität Hagen, there is no commitment to use a specific tool or platform on the client side. This architectural choice improves sustainability. New trends and technologies not only on the client but also on the server can be integrated with ease.

Editing of the XML-documents is the most frequently performed authoring activity during course development. Hence, usability of the XML-Editor is a key issue. The project team chose the commercial XMetaL-Editor that was specially developed for XML-content creation by users who do not have previous knowledge of XML. It was extended by style sheets to provide a view that hides the XML markup and is similar in appearance to the resulting HTML-representation. Customised macros to facilitate course creation were also developed. Users are not constrained to use XMetaL and may use any other XML editor. However, special customisations for the FuXML DTD are currently only provided for XMetaL. It must be noted that the customisations provided for the editor are necessary to achieve optimal usability for the authors. Hence, before choosing a different or additional XML-Editor, the costs of customisation should be carefully examined.

The authoring of media files, such as graphics, animations and sounds, is carried out using tools appropriate for the application in question. The media files are linked to the XML documents by a file reference.

The production server implements the cross-media publishing process. At the moment a PDF and a HTML output can be produced for each course. A course can be published in the learning environment of the FernUniversität Hagen.

The realisation of sustainability and longevity in e-learning projects at universities has always been a big problem. Many projects do not survive a couple of months after the official end of the project. The biggest problem is that of finding adequate personal that is able to operate and maintain the system and provide user support over a longer period of time. The members of the project teams are often not available and are assigned to new tasks or leave the university after finishing their academic work. The central institutions of a university like the computer centre or media centre normally do not have the required resources to take over every completed e-learning project.

In the case of the FuXML project the following issues had to be solved:

For the first two issues solutions have been found which required commitments from the media centre and the computer centre. Due to the fact that the ZFE was part of the project from the very beginning, the third issue has also been addressed adequately. Although some knowledge will inevitably be lost when the project team splits up, the major insights and achievements will be saved for the university.

For the fourth issue a satisfactory solution still has to be found. A solution proposed by the CampusSource [CS] initiative is to make the code open source and let the software support be provided by small and medium-sized businesses. This approach has already shown to be successful for other e-learning projects.

FuXML has been introduced to university personal of several departments. The departments with no technical background have, in particular, shown great interest in the system. A major issue for the success of the system will be the usability of the XML editor. Experience so far has shown, that the acceptance of the XML editor is less a matter of technical knowledge than a matter of willingness and openness to work with a new tool and to adopt novel authoring mechanisms. Authors that are used to direct formatting of contents in a word processor like MS Word must get used to semantic markup of contents. In fact, the demand for semantic markup is what causes most problems, not the introduction of a new authoring tool.

In this paper we described the approach taken by the FernUniversität Hagen to establish a novel organisational and technical procedure for developing course material in the field of distance learning. The university decided to build its own LCMS within the internally funded FuXML project. The requirements placed on a content management system of the university were discussed and the essential parts of the developed system were described. Practical considerations and experiences as well as the integration of the system within the organisational and technical infrastructure of the university were presented.

In conclusion it can be stated, that the technical feasibility of the new approach was successfully demonstrated. The future acceptance of the system within the university will largely depend on the political and financial decisions taken by the university’s administration with regard to further supporting actions.

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks and questions.