Papers in PDF format

many of the students likewise had full time jobs and were taking the course at night, communication had
historically been a problem. E-mail, covered in the course, was used extensively for communication
between the students and faculty as well as assignment distribution. This was particularly convenient for
those students who traveled as a result of their jobs and who could therefore continue to work on
assignments. Because the course was not widely taught, there were no suitable textbooks at the time
covering the material outside those of traditional business research courses. In addition, organization of
the Internet is politely referred to as chaotic and, therefore, the material available changed rapidly, even
during the semester. We were forced to deal with a lack of textbooks, significant change in on-line
systems from month to month, and a lag between data becoming available and that availability being
documented. To overcome these problems, we created a World Wide Web based textbook.
The course's home page featured the syllabus with links from topics to related course material. The
material included cases, readings, pointers to the on-line edition of NorthWestNet's Internet Passport, and
assignments. The cases and readings were prepared by the two instructors. Access to the on-line edition
of NorthWestNet's Internet Passport was provided as part of the University’s institutional membership in
the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium. Copyright on materials was therefore not an issue.
This version of the syllabus was designed as an HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) document using
generally accepted guidelines for world-wide-web document design [DeRose 1994]. The on-line edition of
NorthWestNet's Internet Passport used for the course, however, was an older version which essentially
copied the text from the printed edition into files accessible from a web browser. It made no use of
hyperlinks, and did not follow style guidelines for hypermedia. This provided us with an opportunity to
explore the impact of both document form and content on user satisfaction.
The Survey
At the end of the course, we administered a survey gauging reactions to the Web based material.
[Appendix A] 15 students responded. 14 had never used the Web before taking the class.
Comments indicated that the major problems were dialing into the university computer system and
difficulties in reading on-line material. Computer-based text is not as portable (few students owned
laptops) and convenient as a printed text. Many were accustomed to reading printed materials and had
difficulty adjusting to screen-based text (vision problems were mentioned by several). Losing the
continuity between pages and between links was often cited as a drawback. As one student commented,
"... I think not having much experience with on-line materials could be the reason [for reading
difficulties]."
The survey covered three issues:
(1) whether the students preferred a web-based textbook to a paper one given identical contents
(2) whether the students preferred a web-based textbook to a paper one given that the web-based one
would be more up-to-date, and
(3) whether the students preferred the syllabus, assignments, and other course material to be web-based
or paper-based.
The results were that the majority of the students preferred a paper textbook to a web-based one given
identical contents (10:5). However, given that the on-line version would be more up-to-date, the students
preferred a web-based text (11:4). The students also preferred that the course materials be web-based
(11:4). All of these preferences were statistically significant beyond the 0.001 level.
We suspect that the explanation for these differences are that the students did not find that there was
much value added to the on-line text beyond currency. It had originally been designed and written as a
paper document, and so neither followed principles of good HTML document design nor made significant
use of hyperlinks. The syllabus however was designed as a web document from the start, and made
significant use of hyperlinking, as well as following principles of HTML document design. These results
lead to a number of interesting theoretical and empirical questions regarding the design of web-based
documents.