Approaches to the evaluation of online learning materials

A series of online interactive tutorials have been written as an attempt to develop new educational formats using the World Wide Web (WWW). Each tutor ial consists of a network of linked hypertext documents, where the links se rve to guide users through the information. One of these tutorials was chos en 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. Se veral possible evaluation strategies were considered and rejected. The even tual 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 detai led online questionnaire to provide subjective feedback on user responses. The results of this survey are discussed in the context of the use of the W WW for teaching and training.