Management and Selection of Visual Metaphors for Courseware Development in Web Based Learning

Metaphors are widely seen in the user interfaces of today's Web based applications. Some of the major features of metaphors are their ability to organize information related to any concept and to provide better understanding of the information. The traditional teaching and learning activities of educational systems have enjoyed the benefits of metaphors in several ways. This includes representing metaphors in various forms such as text, graphics, animated images etc. One of the challenges for Web based learning (WBL) courseware developer is to design the appropriate metaphors relevant to the context of information presented in the courseware. This paper focuses on the method of selecting one or more metaphors constructed already by the courseware developers that will help in understanding as well as learning the characteristics needed for the WBL courseware development. The selected metaphors can be considered as guideline objects, from which the desirable characteristics can be applied or recommended for the new metaphors to be defined. To decide upon the candidate metaphors, the repertory grid analysis is proposed