CEPIAH, a method for Evaluation and Design of Pedagogical Hypermedia

We are working on a method, called CEPIAH. We propose a web based system used to help teachers to design multimedia documents and to evaluate their prototypes. Our tool integrates two modules such as EMPI (Evaluation of Multimedia Pedagogical and Interactive software), and SP/UL/FC, a method for designing pedagogical hypermedia. The EMPI module is used to evaluate multimedia software used in educational context. We structured a knowledge base composed of a list of evaluation criteria, grouped through six themes: general feeling, technical quality, usability, scenario, multimedia documents, and didactical aspects. We insisted on multimedia particular aspects: we deeply studied the specificity of multimedia documents (investigating various fields such as photography, typography, picture semantics, cinema...). We also evaluated the way multimedia elements are gathered to prepare the reading acts. We finally determined specific criteria for pedagogical aspects, associated to the previous approaches. A global questionnaire joins all these modules. In this paper, we present the two first modules, EMPI and SP/UL/FC, and an application of distant teaching (and distant learning), commenting the first results of this experiment. We conclude by a short presentation of a third module, on which we are still working.