Tightly coupling authoring and evaluation in an integrated tool to support iterative design of interactive hypermedia educational manuals

摘要

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In this paper we present a framework for the iterative design of interactive Hypermedia Educational Manuals, implemented in a software tool that integrates authoring and evaluation support in order to speed up iterative design cycles. Two unique features of our approach are the automatic generation of a structural description of the manual being designed and the automatic incorporation of interaction data logging elements in the manual during the authoring phase. These are then used by an evaluation tool to generate statistical analyses and graphical presentations of user interactionswith the manual and redesign recommendations. Thus, the architecture of this tool embodies a tight coupling between the design of Hypermedia Educational Manuals and the evaluation of their instructional effectiveness. An experiment was carried out in which a prototype manual was created, tested with a group of students, redesigned based on analyses and recommendations provided by the evaluation tool, and then re-evaluated using data from a second group of students. This experiment showed that the integrated tool does help simplify the evaluation process and improve the efficiency of iterative design cycles.