A Framework and Reusable Tools for Developing Interactive Course Web Sites

Educational World Wide Web site creation systems currently exist which either assist in generating static web sites or offer interactivity without the freedom to personalize tools or web site aesthetics. In this paper, the authors briefly review several existing systems and present a set of tools that they have developed. Their approach differs from other efforts largely in that they provide the beginnings of a component-based framework that can be extended. The tools provide components that can be used to extend an existing web site. They can also be easily configured into a web site creation tool, such as Netscape's Composer. They discuss the nature of the tools they have developed and the application of these tools to existing computer science courses.