Panel: User Interaction Issues in Web-based Telelearning

Tom Calvert¹, Jane Fritz² and Colin Ware^2
1Simon Fraser University
²University of New Brunswick

The World Wide Web (www) provides a widely accessible communication and publishing resource which is being increasingly adopted for the delivery of telelearning. The advantages of the web for online learning must be balanced against the difficulties encountered in developing good user interfaces. The issues the Panel will discuss will include HTML and browser constraints, the need to provide good navigation and sense of presence and problems related to screen size and response time.

Keywords: user interaction, www, telelearning, navigation, response time, virtual learning environments.

The World Wide Web (www) provides a widely accessible communication and publishing resource which is being increasingly adopted for the delivery of telelearning. This is true not only for learning at a distance but also for learning locally within a campus and within a classroom. The advantages of the web for online learning include (1) the adoption of standard protocols which make this medium accessible to a wide range of platforms, (2) the ability to include hyperlinked multimedia in the published material, and (3) the increasing ability for web clients (browsers) to support sophisticated interaction with the server. The latter point is extremely important for online collaborative learning and knowledge building where the learner must share multimedia materials with the instructor and other students. In spite of these advantages, however, it has been found that web based systems have some clear disadvantages. This panel addresses the difficulties encountered in developing good user interfaces for web-based telelearning systems.

The user interaction problems encountered in telelearning include the following:

• HTML/Browser related: HTML gives the user interface (UI) designer much less control than is possible with good graphical user interface (GUI) tools running on their own system. In addition, different browsers may interpret the HTML somewhat differently, both because of design differences and because parameters may be set differently. Thus the UI designer cannot completely control the display on the client platform.
• Screen size and resolution: Since web browsers run on many platforms it must be expected that users will have a variety of screen sizes and screen resolutions. Complex screen layouts using multiple frames, for example, may become unworkable on small screens.
• Response time: If the network used is not completely within the control of the designer, then response times can be unpredictable due to network traffic and different routings. If the course materials are rich in multimedia (high resolution images, sound and movie clips) then users with slow connections may find response times unacceptable.
• Navigation and Sense of Presence: Users can easily become lost in a complex web environment. A more fundamental problem is to give students a "sense of presence" to assist them in building mental models of their virtual learning environments.

These and other user interaction issues which arise in web-based virtual learning environments will be discussed by the panel in the context of their projects in the Canadian TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence.

Tom Calvert
Professor
Computing Science, Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada, V5A 1S6
tom@sfu.ca
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/people/Faculty/tom/

©,1997. The authors, Tom Calvert, Jane Fritz and Colin Ware, assign to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.