Approaches to the Evaluation of Online Learning Materials

SUMMARY

A series of online interactive tutorials have been written as an attempt to develop new educational formats using the World Wide Web (WWW). Each tutorial consists of a network of linked hypertext documents, where the links serve to guide users through the information. One of these tutorials was chosen as a prototype for evaluation of this format. More than 90% of tutorial users are not students of Leicester University, thus it was not possible to carry out conventional evaluation in a controlled laboratory situation. Several possible evaluation strategies were considered and rejected. The eventual method used was to construct each page as a WWW form with the link to the next page writing to a dedicated logfile. This was coupled with a detailed online questionnaire to provide subjective feedback on user responses. The results of this survey are discussed in the context of the use of the WWW for teaching and training.