HYPERMEDIA LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS LIMIT ACCESS TO INFORMATION

Audit trails and questionnaires were used to evaluate students' use of a highly interactive hypermedia learning environment. The learning ma terial under investigation had similar functionality to a WWW interfac e and was composed of images and text combined with rollover and click able maps, hypertext links and interactive questions. Every interactio n a student made was logged in the audit trail, and a method of analys ing the audit trails was applied to measure the amount of information accessed by each student. The most successful student accessed only 32 % of the available information in 93 minutes, and each student studied different material to the others. Students overestimated how much inf ormation they had accessed from the total available, with those access ing the least overestimating comparatively more. The interactive strat egy adopted by learners affected the amount of information accessed, a nd it was concluded that the increasing use of interactive hypermedia in teaching highlights the need for further research in order to ensur e that some students are not systematically disadvantaged. (C) 1998 Pu blished by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.