Pacing a WWW Delivered Course

Traditionally WWW based education systems have been implemented without any effort to pace their delivery, the idea being that some students may feel constrained by a paced course and they should be allowed explore and assimilate at their own pace. However certain problems are now arising with this self pacing approach. Unless the student has acquired autodidactic traits or has enough self-discipline to pace themselves they can run into such problems as: lost in hyper space (where users become disoriented), lack of learning direction, loss of motivation/ place in the course (unless the WWW course is tied to a lecture based course) or a perception that by running through the material that they are more knowledgeable than they actually are. WWW based education systems can thus be a disadvantage to weaker students who were intended to be the prime beneficiaries of the new education systems.

Another area in WWW course development where we must consider pace is in situations where the pace of delivery must be matched with the system objectives and the user profile, certain students have priorities or prior experience therefore their pace differs to that of conventional students.

The concept of pacing facilitates the Hypermedia Design Model associated with web based courses but allows either explicit control or measured control to be exerted over students for their own benefit. Pacing can be beneficial when it is used to teach the student to ignore irrelevant material contained in a large amount of available information, to force the student to acquire learning skills and to summarise.

In this paper I present a number of possibilities for pacing WWW based education systems, discuss their relative merits and drawbacks and introduce the tools that are available to facilitate them.