Interface design for digital courses

The most important delivery medium in integrated e-learning is the computer interface. Instructional designers have greeted the opportunities of the networked multimedia computers with open arms. One problem often overseen in all the enthusiasm, however, is the lack of clear guidelines on what to put where on the screen and what the consequences of certain choices are on the learning processes of the student working with the computer. In this chapter we will present guidelines for the design of Graphical User Interfaces and for the presentation of multimedia content, that are firmly based on both the Human-Computer Interaction and the Educational Psychology literature and that are illustrated with cases from our own experiences at the Open University of the Netherlands.