Planning Effective HCI Courseware Design to Enhance Online Education and Training

To maintain knowledgeable, well skilled employees and sustain their competitive advantage, Government agencies and the corporate sector adopt online courseware designed for education and training. The instructional design of resulting human-computer interaction (HCI), which occurs during a training session, is left as an afterthought. No attention is given to the emergent socialized work-place where on the job training often involves collaborative partnerships. There are no measurable accounts of the effectiveness of sharing such knowledge and expertise with new employees. To this end, an experimental research study was designed to investigate the interactive effect of instructional strategies augmented with either a digital instructional assistant or a traditional class-room tutor, and participants’ preference for training-mode on the acquisition of introductory ethics knowledge. Participants were given the Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire (OSIVQ) to establish their cognitive style [1]. The QUEST Interactive Test Analysis System provided the cognitive performance measuring tool [2], to define the learning analytics and to ensure there were no measurement errors in the introductory ethics knowledge testing instruments. Therefore, reliability of the testing tools was secured through the QUEST calibration techniques, thereby safeguarding the predictability of the research design. The methodology embraced by this experimental research links HCI with the disciplines of instructional science, cognitive psychology and objective measurement to authenticate valuable mechanisms for adoption by the education, training and skills development sectors.