Education, Hypermedia, and the World Wide Web

In the history of human civilization there have been very few things that have had the impact of the World Wide Web on communication and dissemination of information. This is sort of analogous to the printing press, except that the web has grown at a much more dramatic and exponential rate. This impact may prove to be most dramatic in education. Some say that the World Wide Web may totally transform the way we are educated. This growth, particularly in education, is due to many factors. First, it is certainly more convenient for students to be able to learn anywhere at any time. Second, unlike print materials used in previous methods of distance education, materials on the Web can be constantly updated. Third, the web and hypermedia systems in general, have the potential to be adaptive. They can, hypothetically, collect information on the learners knowledge, temperament, learning style etc., and respond accordingly. Fourth, the ability to present multi-media displays including text, graphics, and movement for simulations of phenomena that are difficult to describe in words or static graphics, is greatly enhanced. Fifth, unlike printed materials, Web lessons can be programmed to be interactive so that the learner can, for example, take tests on line and get immediate feedback. Sixth, the complex linking and multi-layered three-dimensional nature of hypermedia would seem to better represent the complex relationships present in any sort of complex knowledge domain, and is almost certainly an organization that is more similar to the way our brains are organized in comparison to linear text.

Unfortunately, there is of course a down side. Despite all this potential, very little research has been conducted aimed at examining the effectiveness of different aspects of web-based instruction. For that matter, there's little research on the effectiveness of Web-Based instruction in general. In terms of the most obvious question, is instruction via the web as effective as traditional "face to face" classes, the research thus far indicates that the two are not significantly different (Hall, Watkins, & Ercal, 2000). For example, in an invited talk at the American Educational Research Association, Ron Owston presented the results of a large scale comparison from York University in Canada, including thousands of students (Owston, 1999). In this experiment several different types of face-to-face classes were compared with "traditional" correspondence courses and web-based courses. Only the same classes that had been taught in all three modes were compared. He and his research team found that students in both the web-based and face-to-face classes performed significantly better than traditional correspondence students, based on final grade. However, performance did not significantly differ between the web-based and face-to-face classes. Interestingly enough, on re-examination of their data they found a large number of F's in the web-based classes. They found that the bulk of these F's were students who did not complete the classes. Further, they found that, when these "incomplete" scores were removed students in the web-based classes scored significantly higher than students in traditional face-to-face classes! Although this study is very interesting and informative, the author acknowledges a number of cautions for interpretation of the results. First of all, this drop out rate is an important finding in itself, and is consistent with other research on all types of distance education, that these techniques work best for students who are intrinsically motivated, and drop out tends to be significantly higher than with traditional classes. Second, the nature of the teachers who teach the web-based vs. face-to-face classes may have been different in that there were more "adjunct/non-regular" faculty who taught the web-based classes. Nevertheless, this large scale study and similar studies clearly cast doubt on the suggestion that traditional "face to face" instruction is inherantly more effective than web-based distance education.

Although there has been little research on web-based instruction there is a larger body of research on educational hypermedia. The term "hypermedia" is generally used to refer to a hypertext system that includes textual, graphic, and animation properties. Hypertext refers to a series of "pages" (screens) that are linked via "hot buttons", and there is no limitation on the way in which the pages may be linked. (The World Wide Web is a hypermedia system that runs via the internet). One of the most important and consistent findings with respect to instructional hypermedia is that students' need guidance and structure. One of the promises of hypertext from it's first development near the end of the last decade was that it could better represent complex knowledge and knowledge interconnectivity than could traditional text. This would give the students more flexibility to traverse the material in any way they chose. Unfortunately, much research since that time has indicated that learners tend to get "lost in hyperspace" without proper guidance and structure. It's important to provide an "obvious" path through documents, while allowing students the opportunity to explore if they so choose. Another very important and consistent finding, which came to the surface with a large study conducted by the Education Testing Service, is that one of the most important predictors of how effective computers are in increasing student learning is the amount of computer training the teacher has (ETS, 1996). Recently, this same issue has been addressed many times with respect to the World Wide Web. In order for the web to serve as an effective adjunct to traditional class, the instructor must know more than how to teach students to surf the web.

About four years ago I discovered the World Wide Web, and I have been obsessed from the start. Since that time most of my own research focus has changed from an examination of knowledge maps and cooperative learning to an examination of the role of the World Wide Web in Instruction. Instead of going into a lot of detail about this research, I will just list a few of my general findings below.

A final and important point that many research have made, and in which I believe strongly, is that the World Wide Web and all of Instructional Technology are simply tools. They are not the end in themselves. One basic principle, active learning, that weaves it's way through so many of our lectures is just as important in an advanced technological learning environments as it is in a face to face class where all an instructor has is a black board. The promise of Web-based learning environments and other learning technologies, is not that they will change the important factors that promote learning, it is that they may be able to aid the instructor in promoting those same principles that effective instructors have always promoted, yet do it in a more effective and efficient manner.

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