3. How to give rhythm to a lesson

The first attempts at preparing course material for the web started in the spring of 2002, with the result that the material thus created, although it was new and not just copied from a printed textbook, lacked rhythm and was not conducive to learning. The student was asked to read the content of a web page, and then move to the next, and so on, for many pages. In spite of some creative use of color graphics and multimedia, this was terribly boring!

Several solutions were considered to somehow force the student to give more attention to the course, and yet not deprive him from all his liberties (for instance by forcing him to stay 30 seconds on each page, or limit his navigational freedom). Two solutions were found to be applicable to the course: