XML – A Solution for Publishing Up-to-date Educational Information on the Internet? Ruairi O’Donnell, Crawford Revie, Monica Landoni, Colm McCartan Department of Information Science Strathclyde University 26 Richmond St, Glasgow, G1 1XH, UK Email: ruairi@dis.strath.ac.uk The Web was first envisaged as an Information Management tool that helped researcher organise and find interesting documents. However with the popularity of the Internet and the its image as a Publication tool for the masses, we now have a Information Mis-Management Tool. Increasingly people are using it for searching using "Web Portals". Web Surfers are morphing into Web Searchers. XML may help us resurrecting the information chaos into some manageable form. This paper will briefly describe XML and its potential benefits for Educational Delivery. 1 Introduction The Web is based on technology, which was initially invented for small information spaces with a small number of users. HTTP, URLs and HTML are excellent solutions to a uniform information management system. With the Internet explosion these standards have been stretched to their limits. The Web has evolved rapidly, so rapidly it seems more like a revolution rather then an evolution. To keep up with these changes the Internet authorities have had a busy time! Each of the original Internet technologies has been extended in numerous ways. HTML has seen the biggest change, initially designed for static text only hypertext pages, now incorporating many different technologies which want to get on the Internet bandwagon. HTML has obvious limitations that need to be resolved. These limitations include: • Unpredictable appearance of HTML documents in Web browsers; • The content of an HTML document is inseparable from the presentation tags; • Meta information in HTML is restricted to document wide semantic name/value pairs; • The majority of search engines index only the textual content of HTML pages. This paper will introduce the main elements of Extensible Markup Language (XML). The paper will outline a case for using XML within Courseware systems. 2 Case Study The potential of XML to improve the delivery of course material is now illustrated through a short case study. The course under consideration is delivered by the authors to first year undergraduate students at the Business School of the University of Strathclyde, and provides an introduction to Business Computing. Many of the generic issues relating to courses supported on the WWW are of relevance to this case study, including facilities for off-campus access, student centred learning, standard browser access, etc. However, there are a number of specific issues related to this course that make it particularly suited to web-based support. Firstly, it is a rather large class, by UK standards, with around 700 students. There is a need to give students, particularly in the first year, some sense of contact with teaching staff but it is clearly not feasible to use traditional small group meetings due to the time and labour intensity that this implies. Secondly, the course is delivered by four staff