I've had a comment about the external links I've embedded into the course and it's made me think about the use and abuse of this feature.
The comment addressed the speed of linking to an external page and whether or not that would be a barrier to those accessing the external data.
While this could be a problem, particularly for those students accessing the materials from home using a steam driven 56K modem, I still think that the benefits outweigh that possible problem. Indeed I think that those students will soon make their own decisons about whether the information gained is worth the click. That does, though, put the onus squarely on the author to choose worthwhile links.
There are also some possible technical solutions to this problem.
In an educational setting I would hope that the appropriate
network settings would be in place (cache and proxies) that would ensure that content was only fetched once for a complete class group.
Other technical solutions might include some pre-fetch software such as Google Web Accelerator. This fetches pages linked from the current page before the links are clicked thus simulating a faster connection.
Neither of these technical solutions should be the responsibility of the course author or host.
In the end there is always going to be a dichotomy between the urge to include "extras" like external links, animations and multimedia components and the realisation that not everyone will be able to access this data. Who wins? It depends on the course. It is clearly not reasonable to attempt an on-line course on, for example, sound editing without including sounds. While that may exclude some possible users a course that excluded them would not be worth having.
On the other hand where course can be produced without using these bandwidth heavy components that should be one of the stated aims.
In the end then the solution is clear. We should always include the multimedia elements. Except when we shouldn't. Everybody clear now?
The comment addressed the speed of linking to an external page and whether or not that would be a barrier to those accessing the external data.
While this could be a problem, particularly for those students accessing the materials from home using a steam driven 56K modem, I still think that the benefits outweigh that possible problem. Indeed I think that those students will soon make their own decisons about whether the information gained is worth the click. That does, though, put the onus squarely on the author to choose worthwhile links.
There are also some possible technical solutions to this problem.
In an educational setting I would hope that the appropriate
network settings would be in place (cache and proxies) that would ensure that content was only fetched once for a complete class group.
Other technical solutions might include some pre-fetch software such as Google Web Accelerator. This fetches pages linked from the current page before the links are clicked thus simulating a faster connection.
Neither of these technical solutions should be the responsibility of the course author or host.
In the end there is always going to be a dichotomy between the urge to include "extras" like external links, animations and multimedia components and the realisation that not everyone will be able to access this data. Who wins? It depends on the course. It is clearly not reasonable to attempt an on-line course on, for example, sound editing without including sounds. While that may exclude some possible users a course that excluded them would not be worth having.
On the other hand where course can be produced without using these bandwidth heavy components that should be one of the stated aims.
In the end then the solution is clear. We should always include the multimedia elements. Except when we shouldn't. Everybody clear now?
No comments:
Post a Comment