Problems and Issues in Designing Hypertext/Hypermedia for Learning

The growth in interest in hypertext and hypermedia (hereafter referred to by the more generic term, hypermedia) in recent years has been staggering. Hypermedia systems are being used extensively in software engineering and collaborative problem solving applications, for online documentation and information retrieval and help systems, as writing aids, and more recently as authoring tools for instruction and learning. Although hypermedia promises great potential for instruction, its efficacy is neither established nor without likely problems. Hypermedia learning systems will place more responsibility on the learner for accessing, sequencing and deriving meaning from the information. This added responsibility will entail added cognitive processing requirements on the learners. In many ways, this increased processing load appears consistent with constructive conceptions of learning and therefore desirable. Yet, it is not clear whether users will be able to assume this additional responsibility and processing load. The issues that this Advanced Research Workshop considered were how the hypermedia information and environment should be organized and displayed and how the information processing requirements specific to learning outcomes can be facilitated by hypermedia.