Abstract:

Introduction:
This paper introduces one of the activities of ICER (Innovation Center for Educational Resources) of Kyushu University Library, Japan. ICER was established in April, 2011 and its mission is to promote the higher education based on instructional design, the development of educational contents using recent ICT (Information Communication Technologies), the e-Learning by recording lectures, editing and releasing those videos as SPOC or MOOC in the university.

Research purpose:
Efficient education will be achieved with attractive educational contents that use the most recent ICT like 3D CG (Computer Graphics) because current students sometimes called video game generation are used to operate such contents. However, there is the problem that the development of such contents requires technological knowledge and programming skills but usual teachers do not have such knowledge and skills. Teachers need any tool to make it easier to develop attractive educational contents that use the most recent ICT. So, this paper proposes a framework dedicated for the development of Web-based Interactive Educational Contents. The framework should support the most recent Web technologies, i.e., HTML5 and various JavaScript Libraries including WebGL (3D Graphics Libraries for JavaScript).

Methodology:
In general, 3D interactive contents include various types of media data like texts, audio, videos and 3D geometry data with their animation data. The framework should also support these media data. There are some story-based contents to follow an instructional design. The framework should accept such story information. The authors of the paper decided to adopt Excel data for defining story-based state transitions of media data like a gantt chart (one of the visualization methods). As a result, the preparation of such Excel data is the all what teachers have to do. In the paper, the authors describe its details.

Case studies:
As case studies, the authors have been developing two educational contents with the proposed framework. One is for learning certain events and ceremonies taken in the Imperial court, including ancient manners of the Emperor (Tennou) and Cabinet members as Japanese history study. The other one is for learning a certain scene of Ancient Chinese Story as a subsidiary material of the ancient Chinese language study (Kanbun) in High School. To make these contents attractive for learners, the teachers had to use various types of media data. With the proposed framework, it became very easy to develop the contents those are interactive Web-based contents that use the recent ICT like 3D CG. Because of the Web-based contents, those are available on various platforms such as iPhone, iPad, and Android tables besides standard desktop PCs. This is significant for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) classes and Mobile Learning.

Conclusion and Future work:
In the paper, the authors propose the framework dedicated for the development of Web-based Interactive Educational Contents. The framework supports the most recent Web technologies, i.e., HTML5 and various JavaScript Libraries including WebGL. The preparation of Excel data that defines story-based state transitions of media data needed in an educational content is the all what teachers have to do when developing the content using the proposed framework. As future work, the authors will try to ask teachers to use the proposed framework for developing interactive Web-based educational contents.

Keywords:

Educational Contents, Development Framework, Web Technology, 3D Graphics.