An Evaluation Instrument for Hypermedia Courseware

This paper presents an evaluation instrument for hypermedia courseware. Its design is based on an evaluation framework developed from the integration of a number of important issues emerged from research on instructional design and system evaluation the past fifteen years and is concerned with both social and practical acceptability of hypermedia courseware. The term social acceptability is related with the social basis of an educational system. Practical acceptability is examined through the evaluation of the following sectors: content, presentation and organization of the content, technical support and update processes and finally, the evaluation of learning. All sectors are equally important, as hypermedia courseware has to be simultaneously pedagogically and technically sound. The paper first discusses other evaluation efforts; next it introduces the evaluation framework and finally presents the evaluation instrument and suggests ways for the analysis of the results.