HyperCourseware is a prototype electronic educational environment developed in 1990 by Kent Norman

Kent Norman

Kent L. Norman is an American cognitive psychologist and an expert on Computer Rage. He graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1969 and earned a Ph.D...

 at the University of Maryland, College Park

University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...

, to be used in an electronic classroom called the "Teaching Theater." The goal was to rehost electronically all of the things that go into education: the materials, (e.g., textbooks, maps and charts, lesson plans, etc.), the tools (e.g., the blackboard, notebooks, calculators, etc.), and the processes (e.g., lectures, discussions, question and answer, etc.).

The objective embraced by HyperCourseware has been quite broad: to provide an integrated and seamless hypermedia infrastructure to support the full range of classroom activities (Norman & Carter, 1992). At the global level, HyperCourseware was organized around educational tools, materials, and objectives rather than around semantic or domain specific knowledge. It is only at the local or content level in the materials that knowledge structure becomes important and is incorporated into the materials by the instructor. Consequently, HyperCourseware was written to host any subject and to support many activities common across courses. These activities range from record keeping and on-line testing to hypermedia presentations and from individual exploration to group collaboration. HyperCoursware uses the conventional objects of classroom instruction and implements them in electronic form in the electronic classroom. Objects such as the course syllabus, the lesson plan, the lecture notes, the class roll, etc. are instantiated in graphic form in a hypermedia database. Furthermore, in HyperCourseware the hypermedia database is used to provide the same sort of natural links between objects as one would expect in the educational materials themselves. For example, the syllabus is a natural navigational mechanism to jump to lectures, readings, and assignments; the classroll is a natural navigational jump to information about students and grades; and the grade list is a natural navigational jump to exams and assignments.

It was first written in a HyperCard

HyperCard

HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...

 like language
called "ObjectPlus" that ran on both the Macintosh platform and Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 on a local area network. In 1998 is was rewritten for the World Wide Web using HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 on a WebStar

Webstar

Webstar may refer to:* DJ Webstar* Kerio WebSTAR, an HTTP server for Classic Mac OS...

 server using FileMaker Pro databases.

External links

• hypercourseware.com, the commercial site for HyperCourseware
• Teaching in the Switched-On Classroom