Evaluation of hypermedia educational systems: criteria and imperfect measures

Educational systems have to be assessed to determine whether their user interface, didactic method, instructional materials and interaction mechanisms help users reach their learning and teaching goals. With this purpose, educational developers need to rely on a set of clear, concrete and measurable quality criteria. In this paper, the authors propose an evaluation framework made up of a number of criteria to test the utility and usability of educational hypermedia systems. They also discuss that measuring these criteria entails different forms of imprecision and uncertainty, that call for the user of representation formalisms like fuzzy set theory. The framework presented here is aimed not only at helping educational developers to evaluate their systems, but also to provide them with some guidance to address educational requirements during the design process.