How "useful" is multimedia on the WWW for enhancing teaching and learning?

The proliferation of multimedia-based educational presentations on the WWW which are designed to enhance teaching and learning is a recent phenomenon. Although some impetus has occurred because institutions seek to broaden and increase their student population and sources of revenue there is an undercurrent that suggests that new Web-based modes of presentation are more "useful" or "better" Educationalists have proposed several methods for measuring how "good" a multimedia-based educational presentation is. The purpose of the paper is not to compare these measures or assess them. Rather, the authors focus on the seminal work of Laurillard and apply her methodology to a broad spectrum of 112 web sites. They present the results of their research and show that more attention needs to be paid to the effective modelling and transmission of "the state of a student's interaction" in order to better support the educational objectives of Laurillard's methodology.