JISC

Start date: 1 August 2000

End date: 31 March 2002

Funding programme: Learning and Teaching (5/99) programme

Project website: http://ebooks.strath.ac.uk/eboni/

Recent movements towards student-centred resource-based learning in UK Higher Education have seen increasing use of Communications and Information Technology for curriculum delivery. The Internet, in particular, is proving a popular platform for the publication of learning and teaching resources, its interactive environment seeing the arrival of new guides, tutorials and textbooks every week, and students are increasingly turning to these digital resources as a first port of call when seeking material to support their studies. 

EBONI will identify and compare the various methods which have emerged in the publication of learning and teaching material on the Web in order to determine the most effective way of representing this information electronically, aiming to maximise usability and information intake by users. An evaluation of texts by an appropriate mix of key stakeholders will be undertaken in order to develop guidelines for best practice in the publication of (non-journal) educational material on the Internet. This will enable the needs of an emerging higher education community of readers and creators of digital content to be met more satisfactorily.

Aims and Objectives

EBONI will develop a set of guidelines for publishing educational texts on the Web that reflect the needs of academics and a diversifying population of students throughout the UK. This will be achieved through an evaluation of texts which are found to be representative of approaches to the design of learning and teaching material on the Internet. EBONI will also attempt to obtain access to stand alone e-books to test the applicability of the Web-based guidelines to other media. The specific objectives of EBONI are to:

• Evaluate the different approaches to the design of learning and teaching resources on the Web and to identify which techniques/styles are most successful in enabling users to retrieve quickly and easily the information they require
• Identify and report on the individual requirements of academics and students in learning and teaching on the Web
• Compile a set of best practice guidelines for the publication of textbooks on the Internet for the UK HE community
• To bridge the gap between publishers of educational material on the Internet and those who use it for learning and teaching

Project design

The methodology employed to achieve the project’s objectives will involve four main phases:

• Selection of material: a survey of the range of teaching material available on the Internet identifying, classifying and finally selecting resources according to use of techniques such as hypertext, tables of contents and navigation icons. In addition, the Web books to be evaluated will cover a number of subjects and students from each area will be sought to participate in their evaluation
• Selection of participants: it is anticipated that 80-100 paid subjects will be used to evaluate these texts, mainly drawn from the HE population at the three universities in Glasgow
• Procedure: users will be involved in both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the experiment:
  • Quantitative feedback will be sought by asking users to search selected material for specific information and to participate in memory tasks. Success in answering questions correctly, time taken to complete tasks, ability to recall information and (depending on facilities available) covert observation of users’ behaviour will be taken into account in interpreting this feedback
  • Qualitative feedback will be sought via questionnaires and interviews immediately following the quantitative phase and will aim to record users’ subjective satisfaction with the experience of reading the material
• Measurement of results: both quantitative and qualitative feedback from tasks, questionnaires and interviews will be analysed to determine the overall usability of each text. The analysis will form the basis of the guidelines for the design of electronic text-based educational material on the Internet. Data will also be analysed on a comparative basis to identify differences between the needs of the representative user groups participating in the experiment

Outcomes

Ultimately, the project addresses the interests and needs of the following stakeholder communities:

• Students and lecturers in FE and HE
• Information professionals
• Writers and publishers of scholarly digital information
• Researchers in digital information retrieval and HCI (Human Computer Interaction)
• Electronic book hardware and software developers
• Projects and services involved in the digitisation of learning and teaching resources
• Funding and other agencies which invest in the creation of scholarly digital resources and/or relevant research and development initiatives

The findings will be disseminated to these communities in the form of a set of best practice guidelines for the design of electronic textbooks for the UK FE and HE community. Project outputs will be disseminated more broadly to users through the project Web site, papers in the professional literature, attendance at relevant UK and international conferences and news items submitted to journals and appropriate mailing lists. Consideration will also be given to holding a series of workshops to teach resource creators how to apply the guidelines.