[quoting Grabrowski, 17 Oct 94] Is there a role for tutorial CBI that is engaging and transactive?
I'm busy with the development of an interactive tutorial on muscle contraction and I'm constantly frustrated by an inability to translate the useful things that would occur between student and instructor/teacher/whatever if a student were to come to my office with questions about the information I had presented in the lecture. I need the courseware to be able to respond to ALL sorts of information, from assessment of the students current understanding and correct background information to the non-verbals they present about their perceived lack of understanding. The courseware needs to be gender-neutral and culturally unbiased, but this grows more difficult as we utilize metaphor and so on to enhance the non-didactic parts of the program. My concept of learner control is that each user can take what they need from a smorgasbord of things, not ranked according to perceived value by the designer of the courseware. (This is the aim of our current project and I call this idea "fingerfood courseware" in contrast to the "set menu" style which is pretty prevalent.) However, the students cry out for direction, as they think they are wasting their time on peripheral stuff and not "learning what they have to know." Mind you, I think this reflects our assessment procedures, etc., more than the courseware itself.
Is it worth the risk to develop it, if there is a chance that we might fail?
YES. At the very least it will make us think about the transactions that occur in traditional learner activities so we can try and harness the good ones and put them on-screen.
If branching happens in between transactions, what does the computer do or how does it respond within a transaction?
The difficulty I see here is that the designer will be defining the completion of the transaction. What happens to the learner who partially completes--or completes according to requirement but feels unhappy with some aspect? (They may have fluked a correct response.) Can the transaction be expanded or contracted to meet individual needs?
In summary, I think that as developers we need to analyze student/tutor transactions and pick out what works, then worry about how we can translate that into a piece of instructional interactive multimedia.