Design principles and guidelines for authoring hypermedia language learning applications

Abstract

The recent popularity and potential of hypermedia authoring shells are increasingly generating high-profile developments of hypermedia courseware in higher education. However, whilst such projects are currently widely encouraged, very little help in the form of design and technical support is being made available to individual authors with little or no design expertise. Furthermore, the commercially produced hypermedia authoring software, which was never initially intended and therefore conceived for delivering learning applications, is not a particularly helpful design tool within the learning environment. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to provide keen, computer literate language specialists in higher education with a manageable set of domain-specific design principles and guidelines with a view to alleviating the complexity of design issues arising out of authoring hypermedia language learning applications.