FIGURE A


The LearningSpace welcome screen is one prime example of the customization made available by developers. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Students enter the course through a full-screen navigator. This navigator includes a welcome statement, links to the major parts of the course environment, the course, and student name. Among the things that can be tailored here include the primary graphic, the size and location of the link icons, the welcome message, and whether or not the day's assignments are posted. This part of the program seemed very well thought out.

The first place a student would go from the welcome screen is into the course schedule. At its highest level, the course schedule represents the course syllabus. The schedule view organizes schedule documents, or lessons, by category. This categorization is defined in the course setup document stored in LearningSpace Central. I organized my lessons by module number. Lesson documents present background information, detail exercises, and instruct the students to take some action either off-line or within another part of the course.

The course schedule database is where I exhausted most of my creative energies coming up with course content. In addition to being a bucket for rich text, schedule documents are also very customizable. You can see a sample course schedule in Figure B below. Instructors can choose who can see schedule documents, whether or not to display associated discussion and assignment action buttons, what media center documents to link to, which view icon to use, and more.

FIGURE B


Here is a sample LearningSpace course schedule. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Hotspots in and around the schedule views and within the schedule documents themselves quickly link the student to other parts of the course, making these databases highly interdependent. The only issue I had with the schedule database was the cumbersome action button-driven process they've designed to sequence documents within a category.

The MediaCenter database is little more than a document repository. Students may open media center documents directly or through linked schedule documents. I used the media center to store copies of presentations delivered during the course. You could also use the media center to store copies of large files used during lesson exercises. Documents here are also customizable.

The CourseRoom database puts the collaboration in asynchronous collaborative learning. This is where discussions are documented and assignments are submitted. Discussions can be initiated from many places within the course. Once a discussion has been started, other students have the option to jump in. Topics can be targeted to one or more individuals participating in the course driven behind the scenes by reader names fields.

Experts say this is the real gold in a good distance learning solution -- students interact to solve problems and complete assignments to a greater degree than within a traditional classroom setting. The shy student has nothing to worry about here. Those of you familiar with Lotus Notes discussion databases will feel right at home here.