Even in non-distance learning this is important. In an evaluation of an
on-line course(s) in Chemical Engineering at RPI, NY they reckoned that
70% of the material was printed out by students so they could look at it
later and at their leisure (of course, knowing students and human
nature, they might not have actually done that). On the end of a modem
its even more important.
The electronic, and tree-saving, equivalent of this is to download the
hypertext. And self-contained hypertext 'modules' would be ideal to
distribute to students and others e.g. schools.
Tools to check the integrity of links already exist, largely they solve
the problem of infinite links by confining themselves to the one site. A
variant of such software which started at an initial document, saved it
to a disk directory and then followed all the local links and saved them
would be easy to write and manageable. It wouldn't work for everything
but it could work on a course like this if authors had this in mind.
Maybe its something we could explore. One of the things which might
(should?) come out of a course like this is How to ...
"Guidelines to authors of hypertext for on-line courses" for example.
Alan Ward
-- Email: Alan.Ward@ncl.ac.uk Alan Ward FAX: +44 (0) 191 222 7736 Department of Microbiology Tel: +44 (0) 191 222 7709 University of Newcastle upon Tyne WWW: http://monera.ncl.ac.uk/