Development of WWW courseware: Experience of design and implementation

We have been commissioned by the Curriculum Development Institute of the Education Department in Hong Kong to develop a courseware called the “Induction CD-ROM (Sixth Form Electronics): to support the introduction of a new Sixth Form syllabus, the AS Level Electronics, which will be offered in most technical and prevocational schools in September, 1997. The main objective of this courseware is to provide a set of interactive activities, documents and learning resources inducting students who lack the necessary background knowledge into the Sixth Form Electronics curriculum via self-learning. This courseware is being designed in accordance with an appropriate programmed learning model and includes those traditional curriculum materials plus various interactive multimedia attributes. In this paper, we relate our practical experience (such as planning, organization, design strategy, reviewing mechanism, and some technical details) of developing this courseware for Hong Kong schools. We also describe how to evaluate the difficulties of the actual school implementation, the effectiveness of learning, and the students’ attitudes about this courseware based on a number of questionnaire surveys and classroom observations. Copyright © 1997 Social Sciences Research Centre and authors of papers.