How important is the Guided Hypermedia in Teaching and Learning Process?

• Guided Hypermedia plays important role in teaching and learning process, it helps to have a rich and active interaction between the learners and the teacher. When the teacher uses guided hypermedia in his teaching, he would be able to get the interest of the learners to listen to the discussion. The learners will also be able to participate to the discussion whenever the learner is interested to listen.

            In the role of audience to hypermedia, students interact with hypermedia environments developed by others. Examples of this type of interaction would include reading articles in online encyclopedias, observing a PowerPoint presentation (with links and other multimedia elements) developed by a teacher, playing interactive adventure games, or looking at various interactive websites on the Internet. Lu (n.d.) would consider this as level 1, or read only hypermedia. As an audience to hypermedia, children often still manage to control how they navigate through the information, and one child is likely to navigate the material in a different order than another. Students will choose their paths based on their interests and objectives. While students are able to have some control in this role, they are still limited by the design decisions made by the software designer or their teacher (Turner and Handler, 1997).

            The second of these broad categories would include students as authors of their own hypermedia. In this role, students will develop hypermedia projects by conducting research on a topic, identifying relevant information, and then selecting what elements to include in a final product. Students will have to consider the layout of the text as well as what multimedia components to include in their product. Students must also determine how they will link information based on whom the intended audience will be. In addition, students will have to learn how to use software components, or perfect their knowledge of the software they are using, and then debug any problems they encounter (Turner & Handler, 1997). This second broad category of authoring hypermedia would correspond to Lu's (n.d.) level 2 (participatory) and level 3 (exploratory) hypermedia. Using hypermedia in this context will not only allow students to have control over how they learn, but will also force them to learn basic information and use higher level thinking skills in the process developing their final hypermedia product.