IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 41, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 1998 347
Structural and Navigational Analysis of Hypermedia Courseware
Chuen-Tsai Sun,
Member, IEEE,Chien Chou,
Member, IEEE.and Bing-Kuen Lin
Index Terms—Algorithmic analysis, courseware structure, educational hypermedia, hypermedia navigation.
I. SUMMARY
In addition to providing flexible access to instructional information and supporting convenient learning styles, educational hypermedia offer a nonsequential information presentation that markedly differs from conventional instructional systems. Many pedagogical issues are attributed to the nonlinear structures of educational hypermedia systems. Consequently, an ideal educational hypermedia system should provide navigation guidance, knowledge construction assistance, and courseware analysis tools. By emphasizing courseware structure and navigational behavior in an educational hypermedia environment, this work presents several algorithmic analytical models of ideal educational hypermedia systems. Three graph algorithms and educational hypermedia analyses are used to identify courseware structures: minimum cut-set, strongly connected components, and cut vertex. The algorithms allow us to construct a knowledge hierarchy, analyze a courseware network to determine whether it is well-structured, and automatically generate a hierarchical guidance map to help users navigate in a hypermedia environment. This work also provides two quantitative measures, hyperdegree and hyperdistance, to further describe navigational behavior in hypermedia environments. These methods were applied to the data accumulated during instructional experiments.
Chuen-Tsai Sun (S’90–M’93) is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at National Chiao Tung
University in Taiwan, where he teaches courses in artificial intelligence, neural networks, evolutionary computing, and so on. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1992.
Chien Chou (M’95) received the Ph.D. degree in instructional design and technology from The Ohio State University, Columbus,
in 1990.
She is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication Studies at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, where she teaches courses in multimedia message design and evaluation, multimedia video, hypertext writing, and so on.
Bing-Kuen Lin received the B.S. degree in Department of Transportation Engineering and Management and M.S. degree in Computer
and Information Science from National Chiao Tung University in 1994 and 1996, respectively.
He is currently working as a System Analyst in Texas Instrument Taiwan Ltd. His research interests include hypertext structure, computer-assisted learning, and so on.
Manuscript received February 4, 1998; revised August 3, 1998. CD-ROM folder 07.
C.-T. Sun is with the Department of Computer and Information Science National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan. C. Chou is with the Institute of Communication Study National Chiao Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan.
B.-K. Lin is with the Department of Computer and Information Science National Chiao Tung University. Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9359(98)09457-6.
