Evaluation Criteria for Hypermedia Educational Systems

Educational systems, as highly interactive applications, need to be assessed to determine if they are useful and usable. Evaluating an educational system involves testing its user interface as well as studying the underlying didactic method, the instructional materials and the interaction mechanisms to prove if they help users to reach their goals. With this purpose, educational developers need to rely on a set of clear, concrete and measurable quality criteria. In this paper, we propose a number of evaluation criteria for educational hypermedia systems that are based on the authors’ experience as developers of educational systems, such as CESAR, Now-Graduado or CIPP. Such criteria are aimed not only at helping educational developers to evaluate their systems but also to provide them with some guidance to address educational requirements during the design process.

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