Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

8.3 Critique of the study 8 DISCUSSION
8.3 Critique of the study
The goal of this study as it was set at the beginning was to realise the separation of
educational and technical content in educational hypermedia. Consequently, the
major focus of this study has always been on this issue. During the work done
on the project, several other issues were discovered, such as the creation, usage
and management of the content space or the optimisation of the presentation of
the created educational material. It would have been interesting to evaluate those
issues, but this will have to be left for future research in this area.
Furthermore, problems of a more social nature, as for example the willingness of
teachers to share their work and their educational material, could be analysed in
depth. However, these issues will have to be addressed in further research projects.
Another aspect that has to be addressed is the possibility of an experimenter ef-
fect on the test participants as the author knew all the participants personally and
explained the model (cf. section 5.2.1), provided the existing material (cf. sec-
tion 5.2.3) and demonstrated the HEAT (cf. section 5.2.3). However, the answers
given by the test participants during the evaluation interviews were critical and
gave insight into the advantages and disadvantages of the EFTECS and the HEAT.
Furthermore, an aspect of this research project which could be criticised is the fact
that the practical evaluation of the HEAT was done by the author. However, even
though it is problematic that a system is evaluated by the creator of the system, in
this case it was the only possible way of acquiring information about the EFTECS
and the HEAT in a more real-life scenario, e.g. regarding the amount of converted
data and the creation of new material with the HEAT. The insights gained from
this evaluation have been critically analysed (cf. chapter 7) and discussed (cf.
chapter 8). Issues which could not be addressed in this PhD project and which
will have to be dealt with in future research are being pointed out in this work (cf.
section 9.2).
The focus of this PhD after the interview and the practical evaluation had to lie
on the EFTECS and the HEAT. All the other interesting research areas had to be
defined as out of scope for this PhD.
Another aspect that has to be mentioned is the selected methodology of the eval-
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