Navigational behaviors in hypermedia documents in music

Abstract

Hypermedia is defined as an interactive multimedia application where discrete information units of various formats can be accessed in nonlinear ways. This kind of application does differ from traditional information delivery systems in allowing the user considerable freedom in making navigational decisions; users are able to determine, at least to some extent, the media-form of presentation and the order of material presented. However given this freedom, it is possible in some situations that learners might stray from the teacher's instructional objective and become overly engaged in unrelated browsing activities. This study investigates navigational behaviors made by college undergraduate music appreciation students who used a hypermedia program as a supplement to traditional instruction. Results indicated that students accessed these materials in strikingly different ways. While some users read the screens in linear fashion not viewing any multimedia nodes, others made many nonlinear jumps and investigated multimedia nodes often. Although most students did access the musical nodes, most did not listen to the musical examples in their entirety. Overall lesson length varied considerably. Results also indicated that students acted in dynamic fashions, making many navigational actions that were not related to the established instructional objective.