using the Web for training

[Melissa Woo <melissa@phantom.ehs.uiuc.edu>]

I've chosen to stay WAY out of the discussion on the subject of the HPS
web page, so I thought I'd bring up a related subject...

Are any of you using, or thinking of using, the Web as part of a radiation
safety training program?

I wrote a number of web pages on laser safety a while back.  However, even
though I wrote them, I'm the first to admit that they are, well, a little
dull.  (then again, just how interesting can a list of laser safety
control measures be??? <grin>)

I was thinking of approaching the analytical x-ray safety material differently
(and I swear I'll start working on this today :-) ).  I'd like to display
the material in the form of a cross between a tutorial and a seminar.  I figure
that what I put up on the Web can approximate what I plan to teach in
the analytical x-ray safety training sessions that I plan on doing.  The
format of the pages would be a little like slides, but have the added
capability of hypertext/hypergraphics.

So... the format I'm kicking around would be something like this:

The home page for the training material would be an outline/contents page
that might look like:

***
	Basic Radiation Safety
		-properties of x-rays
		-minimizing radiation exposure
		-(etc., etc.)
	Etc., etc.
		-blah, blah...
***

Each of the bulleted items would be a hypertext link.  Clicking on the
"minimizing radiation exposure" link would hop to a page that looks something
like this:

***
	In order to minimize your radiation exposure, there are three
	concepts you should remember...

	-Time
	-Distance
	-Shielding
***

Where Time, Distance, and Shielding are all separate links that will
hop to a description of each.

What worries me about this approach is what is generally thought of as the
benefit of using the Web -- its hypertext/hypergraphics capability.  That
is, will such a tutorial/training method be less effective because one
may lose linearity when jumping from topic to topic?

What is attractive about using the Web, as opposed to say, paper, is that
I can put up photographs which tend not to photocopy well.  Additionally,
an advantage is that the technology is new and "hip" enough that it might
actually suck some of the users into (gasp!) looking at the stuff.

If one gets really ambitious, one could write the necessary scripts to
put a quiz online that people can fill out; the script could output the
answers to the person in the rad safety office that corrects them.

Comments?  Does anyone have URLs of anyone who has done this type of thing?


-- 
Melissa Woo                       | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Health Physicist                  | Environmental Health & Safety Bldg., MC225
office phone: 1.217.244.7233      | 101 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL  61801
m-woo@uiuc.edu                    | http://www.cso.uiuc.edu/ph/www/m-woo