Hypermedia Authoring for Education: The SHAPE project

Authoring of large-scale applications requires a lot of planning in order to develop applications that are easily maintainable and in which information can be easily reusable [Ginige et al., 1995]. And when authoring is applied to education the number of variables to analyse increases significantly. Education is concerned with transmitting the information in a such a way that allows the learner to construct a mental model of the information given [Norman, 83], [Jih & Reeves, 92], [Carr, 95]. Both the learner and the author can have different levels of control over the information [Whalley, 93] but as far as education is concerned it is important to present learners information within a context [Simon, 95], [Whalley, 93], [Thüring et al., 95], [Jonnassen, 93], [Hammond, 93], [Landauer et al., 93]. Consequently the learner can interact with the application and keep both local as well as global coherence [Thüring et al., 95].