Toward a Web based Environment for Evaluation and Design of Pedagogical Hypermedia

We are working on a method, called CEPIAH. We propose a web based system used to help teachers to design multimedia documents and to evaluate their prototypes. Our current research objectives are to create a methodology to sustain the educational hypermedia design and evaluation. A module is used to evaluate multimedia software applied in educational context. We structured a knowledge base composed from a list of evaluation criteria, grouped in six themes: general feeling, technical quality, usability, scenario, multimedia documents, and didactical aspects. We insisted on multimedia particular aspects: we thoroughly studied the specificity of multimedia documents (investigating various fields such as photography, typography, picture semantics, cinema...). We also evaluated the way multimedia elements are gathered to prepare the reading acts. We finally determined specific criteria for pedagogical aspects, associated to the previous approaches. A global questionnaire joins all these modules. In this paper, we present the first two modules, EMPI and SP/UL/FC (a method for designing pedagogical hypermedia), and an application of distant teaching (and distant learning), commenting the first results of this experiment. We conclude by a short presentation of the third module, on which we are still working.