Planning effective HCI to enhance access to educational applications

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are widely believed to offer new options for Web-mediated courseware design. Multimedia and online courseware development accentuates a belief that highly graphical (or visual) delivery media will meet the individualised instructional requirements of diverse student cohorts. While most electronic courseware may allow the user to proceed at their own pace, two assumptions are commonly made by courseware designers. Firstly, to facilitate learning, all users are assumed capable of assimilating the graphical content with their current experiential knowledge. There is little or no consideration of different cognitive styles. Understanding learner attributes is essential to increasing accessibility to computerised information. Secondly, learning is assumed rather than demonstrated. To deal with this issue, data analysis techniques can be used to differentiate between what an individual knows from what they do not. This paper presents two research projects that demonstrate the importance of awareness for the human-dimension of human-computer interaction (HCI) in designing effective online experiential learning for special education.