WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF ON-LINE EDUCATION

Prepared by Richard H. Shook
This series of WEB pages has been developed for the "Education To Go" program offered by Berkshire Community College located in Pittsfield, MA. The name of the course is "Creating WEB Pages" and was conducted entirely via e-mail. The course consisted of two sessions per week over a six week period. Lesson outlines, along with appropriate assignments were distributed each Wednesday and Friday by the instructor. Completed assignments were returned to the instructor for evaluation via e-mail and a quiz was conducted via the internet.

The final assignment of the course was to place on the internet a series of pages utilizing the various concepts and subjects which were covered. To this end, I have created pages which illustrate some of the many topics from the class and present them in a manner which should be helpful to anyone desiring a basic introduction to creating WEB pages. First, the language which is employed for creating WEB pages is "HTML", which is an abbreviation for "HyperText Markup Language."

The HTML language is composed of various instructions known as "TAGS" which direct the WEB server to perform specific tasks. If you click on the underlined word "TAGS" you will execute what is known as a hypertext link which can be thought of as a transfer command. In this instance, you will be transfered to another page which will explain various HTML tags. To return to this page, a transfer or link back here will be found at bottom of the "TAGS" page. A hypertext link is denoted initially by its blue color and subsequently by its purple color after you have clicked on it. The default color combination of blue and purple can be changed via options within the "body" tag of a page.

Lastly, a method for summarizing large amounts of information in a way that it can be quickly and easily scanned is the "TABLE" tag. Data is displayed in a tabular format via "tr" (table row) and "td" (table data) tags. Although very sophisticated and complex tables can be designed and created via the "TABLE" tag, my sample table is a very simple design which provides informative data at a glance.

Upon examination of the source code for the various pages in this series, individuals interested in the subject matter can readily conclude that the course can be a comprehensive and progressive introduction to creating WEB pages.

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