Evaluation in a project life-cycle: the hypermedia CAMILLE project

Abstract

This paper reports on a series of evaluations undertaken in the countries which participated in the CAMILLE project.1 The principal aim of this European project has been the development and delivery of hypermedia courseware in Dutch, Spanish and French. The courseware encompasses the training of general linguistic competencies for beginners (Dutch and Spanish) as well as competencies related to the use of language for specific purposes (French). The target audience includes students in science or business, and technicians or engineers from SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises - small businesses). This report may be of interest to two kinds of reader of this journal, as follows. • Each one of our packages exploit the full range of hypertextual and multimedia facilities currently provided by standard computing platforms. Furthermore, each package offers learners a large-scale learning environment capable of supporting autonomous study. Consequently, these preliminary outcomes relating to the way CAMILLE has been practically used by learners and to its effectiveness are of potential interest to teachers, trainers and educational advisers. • The various experiments conducted by the teams and integrated into the process of software development will be of interest to Computer-Aided Learning (CAL) developers in general. Indeed, within the CAL literature, the issue of integrating evaluation into the life of a project, i.e. either in the course of the development or at the end of it, has often been recommended but much less frequently reported, at least for this type of environment. The paper discusses the constraints, advantages and drawbacks of actually adopting such a procedure.