Australian Toolbook User Group
Opening question - to scroll or not to scroll? Solution by John Chapman
I have begun developing a large application whereby I am converting a paper-based course into a TB II application. I have a question concerning effectives styles and would appreciate your opinion.
Some of the instructions portions of the course contain rather lengthy text sections. I have initially confined the text to a single TB II page with a scroll bar. Some of these sections might otherwise be spread over 5 or 6 pages if they were not in a scroll bar.
Is there a body of experience that suggests that one method is more effective than the other (one page with scroll bar or many pages with explicit text)?
Comment - multimedia is incompatible with lots of text Solution by John Hall
John - there's likely a wonderful body of knowlege somewhere of which I'm not aware. I can share my experiences however.
The first question I ask myself when I have lots of text like this is "Why is this being done on the computer?"
Now before you hit the delete key, the obvious answer is not always that multimedia is incompatible with lots of text. But it does beg the question of why one would put lots of text on computer where it is typically much more difficult to read and a lot less portable than print documents. Still, I find myself including a lot of text at times. My sense is that it's probably unavoidable when you need random access to a large body of material or when the computer based information is paralleling an existing text, with media-based enhancements.
Given that little soapbox, the bottom line based on my experience is "How captive is your audience?"
If you have a captive audience, putting the information into scrolling fields is actually probably better
since you can program the computer to advance one screen with the page down or space bar, with a minimum of precision-based button clicks. From a comprehension standpoint, I would guess that single-page-oriented information that relied upon bullet points summarizing the audio would be the ideal. The bullet points summarize the important points the readability significantly increases when you can increase the point size a few points.
Like I said ... personal opinion.
I'll be interested in positivistic research on the topic :-)
Comment - My experience in writing technical courses Solution by G Pearson
We are often faced with this situation when writing technical courses. The customer throws us a manual or a paper based training course. As John Hall has already pointed out, instructional material designed for delivery on paper is not necessarily right for a multi-media presentation.
The trick is to extract the message & present it in such a way that you can incorporate multi-media and interactivity
Depending on the nature of the script this can amount to a minor operation or major surgery. Courses based on regulatory material are the worst since it is usually intended for delivery in a highly organised & logical manner. We hate them.
The committees that write these things get upset if you re-order & change words so that normal people can understand them & the training officer gets upset because they want interactivity & plain English. However, I digress. The point is that multi-media CBT is all about interactivity. What we would normally do is break the script up & present bits of information in an interactive way. For example, to describe a piece of machinery we might have a graphic with hotspots over the components. Click a hotspot & you get a popup viewer or go to another page with the relevant portion of script plus the multi-media element. HOWEVER, there are times, particularly with technical courses, that the ONLY way to describe a principle of operation or a concept, is to present it in an ordered & logical manner, in other words the book metaphor, a page at a time.
Now I must point out that we are not experts in this field & we are not qualified instructional designers. We base our approach entirely on personal experiences & feedback from our customers in the workplace. We learned early in the piece, back in the days of DOS, that
people HATE reading text off computer screens. They particularly hate reading text out of scrolling fields.
Experienced industrial training officers who rarely have instructional design experience, have told us time after time "ONE TOPIC OR CONCEPT PER PAGE". They don't like scrolling text because a lot of people just can't be bothered to read it.
The bottom line is that for most courses the text has to go into the course. The big advantage of CBT is that you can take that text & present it in such a way that the student has to actually do things to get the information. You can make them enjoy doing it, & bring the text to life by using multi-media. We never use scrolling fields unless there is a compelling reason. We always prefer the book metaphor.
These are purely personal views based on experience & I might be setting myself up as a clay pigeon here. However, we Kiwis have thick skins & I can take the flak so anybody feel free to blast away. Living just across the ditch from Aussieland I am used to it now anyway.
Comment - On breaking text up into smaller screens Solution by Kenneth Tait
I am just completing the analysis of the undergraduate use of a large CBL application (800+ Toolbook pages and over 1000 photographs, graphics, animations and video clips) that has replaced about 80 hours of undergraduate lectures.
In the short timescale we had to produce the material (around 12 months) we used a system developed here to generate the Toolbook applications automatically from marked up text (SGML compliant, similar to HTML). We allowed the existing lecturers to submit their own text which was tehm marked up and 'compiled' into Toolbook applications.
One consequence of working this way was that a good deal of the text sections were too long to fit on one screen page and scroll bars were added during compilation.
When asked how the material could be improved almost a fifth of the students made suggestions which were related to reducing the text, breaking it up etc.
This supports a belief I have had for years that scrolling text should be avoided, particularly in learning situations.
The computer screen is a very small window on to the material and we should not force learners to try to understand large chunks of text this way.
It is better if the text is broken up into smaller meaningful chunks that comfortably fit on the screen and which can be comprehended as they stand. I think this means that some re-writing of paper-based text is inevitable for maxiumum effectiveness. Our lecturer-authors were not given guidelines or training and hence wrote in the way they always have: the academic paper or the textbook and we could have done better.
Nevertheless the material has been well received by the students and their criticisms are pointers to improvement rather than a rejection of the method or the approach.
Comment - short, bite-sided chunks of text Solution by Douglas R Flather
Here's how I handle looong text blocks from professors.
1. In advance tell them your specs for data submission: Data needs to come in short, bite-sided chunks.
2. When they don't comply, YOU break it down into logical 200-300 word segments. People seem to tire of reading more than 200-300 words on a single screen. I really try to avoid scrolling fields.
3. The key is to place some sort of interactivity on every screen. This usually works very well with long text blocks (broken down). Here's an example. After a long diatribe, create a quiz box that asks "Which of the following statements best summarizes what you just read?" Provide two answer statements, and attach fun .wav files to each (like a crowd wildly cheering).
This does several things:
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