Lecture vs. Review/Study Display

Initial response from students (Fall 96) regarding the use of on-line lecture notes as a lecturing tool was that the full notes were too detailed and contained too much text for use in the lecture hall. All that was really needed was the figures/diagrams/animations so the lecturer could refer to them during presentation and discussion.

A single HTML document can be used for both lecture support and as notes to study from. By using conditional <HIDE> and <SHOW> HTML commands, different parts of a web page can be hidden or revealed depending on how the user "logs into" the site. These <HIDE> and <SHOW> commands are part of extensions to the Server Side Includes (SSI) that many Web servers support. In my work I used such extensions provided by the CGI program and plugin called NetCloak from Maxum.com on a Macintosh platform running the Webstar server software.

For example:

<h3>Pea Plants Were Chosen (Why?) </h3>
<HIDE_PASSWORD lecture>
<ol type="1" start="1">
<li>Easy to grow. </li>
<li>Variety of characteristics. </li>
<li>Controllable breeding <ol type="a">
<li>normally self-fertilizing </li>
<li>enclosed anthers and stigmas </li>
<li>could remove immature anthers before they
fertilized their own stigmas </li>
<li>could be sure of parentage of seeds. </li>
</ol>
</li>
<li>Traits studied were "either/or" types of
characteristics: </li>
</ol>

All of this would be hidden from view if the user logged into the site with the password 'lecture'. Any other password would allow this portion of the web page to be shown.

So to use this material as a lecture supplement, one would use 'lecture' as the password. When a student logs in with any other password, this material would appear as part of the study notes.

<SHOW>
<p align="center"><img src="BasicMendel_gifs/pea_phenotypes.gif"
alt="pea phenotypes" width="319" height="257" naturalsizeflag="3"></p>

This part of the web page (image) would always be shown regardless of how the user logged into the site (lecture and study/review modes).

Actual demonstration of the use of <HIDE><SHOW> in a set of lecture/studying notes depends on server software. So here are two demonstration files that mimic how the two sets of pages would look depending on how they were "served": Class lecture on AIDS vs. Study notes on AIDS.