Literature Review

Electronic texts are an essential component of any e-Learning environment. The way that the user interface is designed to support navigation in electronic texts is critical since it determines the way that the texts can be traversed and it is vital that navigation problems, such as ‘feelings of lostness’ (e.g. Conklin 1987), are avoided. In e-Learning environments, a key question is how navigation affects learning, and one important aspect of the learning process is that learners feel ownership for their learning (e.g. Cunningham et al 1993).

Previous research has demonstrated that navigation aids affect the way users interact with educational electronic texts and this, in turn, influences the achievement of learning outcomes (e.g. McDonald and Stevenson 1999). We extend this by hypothesising that different navigation aids will also impact upon users’ feelings of ownership for learning and we present two experiments designed to investigate these effects. The first experiment examined the effects of the level of navigational freedom offered by a navigation aid on feelings of ownership for learning. The second experiment examined the effects of allowing learners the opportunity to create their own navigation aids on feelings of ownership for learning.

‘Electronic text’ is used here as a generic term to refer to any text presented in an electronic medium. These texts may be presented in a variety of ways including WWW and stand-alone CD-ROMs. Examples include hypertext documents (nodes of text connected by embedded links), text organised in menu structures, or linear text organised as a set of sequential nodes or as a single scrollable document. We define ‘navigation aids’ as elements of an interface that allow the user to access and traverse electronic texts; examples include embedded links, menus, interactive maps, and bookmarks.