The need for a hypertext instructional design methodology

Educators are showing an interest in media rich presentation systems as a means of giving additional material to a class or of showing concepts in a graphical fashion during class. Educators have concerns, however, about the length of time it takes to design and implement media rich or multimedia systems, about copyright issues, and whether the system will be used more than once. They also want to be able to design the system using sound instructional principles, but may not have any time for acquiring such specialized knowledge and, indeed, they probably did not take any education classes while working on their advanced degrees. To help educators and students design effective and instructionally sound systems quickly, a hypertext instructional design engineering process can be used to help them to concentrate on structuring their system and on monitoring design violations. The process includes a requirements stage, a specifications stage, an implementation stage, validation for each stage and evaluation of the resulting system. The products of these stages are developed with object-oriented techniques which will eventually result in a hypertext system for instructional usage.