8. Fully Featured vs. Lean-and-Mean?

Abstract

With students in an “Educational Conferencing” graduate course, a comparison was conducted between the merits of an online collaborative package containing a wide range of features and alternative conferencing software containing only a threaded discussion and search feature only. The responses of fourteen students taking part in the study revealed a clear preference for the simpler approach. The study has implications for the selection of software tools in the design of online course environments and for the re-design of the product ratings system used in the current series of evaluation studies.

Keywords:

• distance education technology evaluation