Author Archives: Roger Hudson

Internet Advertising and the Law (1999)

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Contents

Introduction

Advertising is an essential element of a market economy. It allows suppliers to disseminate information about their products and promote them to potential customers. This information is used by consumers to make informed choices about the products they wish to purchase. Suppliers need customers as much as customers need suppliers, but when it comes to advertising the relationship between the two parties is not equal. The customer depends on the information presented in advertisements to make an “informed” choice, but it is the supplier who determines the content, accuracy, style and placement of that advertising material.

Governments throughout the world aim to redress this imbalance by providing protection to their citizens through laws and regulations which control the use of advertising. In Australia for example, the Commonwealth Trade Practices Act and the Fair Trading Acts of the various states provide guidelines for acceptable conduct in advertising and enable consumers to take action for compensation when these guidelines are breached. Importantly, consumer groups and rival traders can also bring actions under these acts. In addition to consumer protection, these Acts enable the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and its state equivalents, to ensure fair competition in the marketplace.

While there has been global advertising through international magazines for many years, most advertising campaigns concentrate on a specific country, or parts of a country, and are regulated by the laws of that country. In recent years however, satellite television and services like CNN have opened up the global market to large television advertisers. Also, the introduction of the Internet, with its ability to disseminate information to a global market quickly and cheaply, offers unique advertising opportunities, raising new issues for advertisers, consumers and regulators to consider.

This paper deals with the use of the Internet and World Wide Web to promote and advertise goods and services, and is not concerned with the promotion of Web sites per se through various on-line means like banner advertising.

Global Marketplace

The Internet is a new marketing medium and governments are only beginning to develop laws which will regulate the way it is used both nationally and internationally. The legal issues associated with Internet advertising however, will be largely the same as those concerned with traditional forms of advertising in other media such as print and television.

While the laws regulating advertising in many countries have fundamental similarities, there can also be significant differences. For example, comparative advertising, which is legal in the US and Australia, is prohibited in Germany, and some countries like France have strict language requirements. In Australia there are laws which prohibit racist and religious vilification, while many other Pacific Rim countries, whatever their cultural sensitivities to these issues, provide little or no legal protection.

Access to a global marketplace brings benefits to consumers through increased competition and choice. The international nature of global transactions however can raise problems for consumers. In recent years, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has found itself dealing with increased complaints by Australian consumers about products they have purchased from other countries, there have also been complaints from overseas about products purchased from Australia.

The potential for cross-border transaction problems are compounded by the fact that the laws in different jurisdictions, be they states or countries, often differ. When a cross-border action is commenced in a jurisdiction, the courts of that jurisdiction do not automatically apply their own law.

“Respect for the laws of other jurisdictions has led courts to develop choice of law rules to determine which State or country’s law should apply.”
Law Reform Commission Discussion Paper, “Choice of Law Rules”

Deciding which law covers a dispute can be very complex, depending as it often does on finding a balance between many competing factors. In summarising the issues involved, the Law Reform Discussion Paper indicates that in some cases there is either a prima facie link with one of the countries involved, or the parties have made an explicit or implied choice of which law should cover their transaction. In other cases however, when the issue is not so clear, the courts have to decide which system of law the transaction has the closest and most real connection or association with.

As a result, laws from the country of the supplier or the country of the purchaser have been applied to disputes arising from cross-border transactions, regardless of where the case is heard. For example, when hearing the case of Mendelson-Zeller Co. Inc. v. T. & C. Providores, which involved the purchase of fruit from a company in California by a company in New South Wales, the Supreme Court of New South Wales held that the proper law was that of the state of California. In another famous case, The Assunzione (1954), the competing factors seemed to be evenly divided between French and Italian law, but the court chose Italian law on the basis that the contract called for payment in Italian currency.

Having decided under which law a case should be heard, there is a second problem of which courts may hear the case. This is known as the problem of jurisdiction, since it is possible for a dispute to be governed by the laws of one country, but no court in that country has the jurisdiction to hear the case. Even when the parties from different countries in a cross-border dispute agree on the choice of law and the jurisdiction, it may be difficult to get the party from outside that jurisdiction to appear or abide by the findings of the court. In the future, this situation is likely to be quite common with cases arising from Internet transactions, as these will often be consumer disputes involving relatively small amounts of money.

Advertising and the Internet

“When a marketeer places advertising or a sales promotion on a server in Chicago, Boston or New York that advertising or promotional offer may be accessed throughout the world. From a legal perspective, the question is whether countries other than the United States can exert jurisdiction over advertising or promotional material that is deemed unlawful by that foreign country.”
Lewis Rose and John Feldman, “Internet Marketing”

Rose and Feldman are partners in the US law firm Arent, Fox, Kinter, Plotkin and Kahn, based in Washington DC. Lewis Rose also maintains the Arent Fox Advertising Law Internet Site. Leaving aside the US centric nature of the above quote, the central question it raises applies to suppliers of goods and services from all countries (and states with separate legal jurisdictions within countries) who wish to advertise their products on the Internet.

In the United States, government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been actively looking at Internet advertising and its misuse for a number of years. The FTC took its first action in March 1996, when it charged nine companies with making false and unsubstantiated advertising claims in their Internet marketing. At the time, Jodie Bernstein, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, described the Internet as a new frontier for advertising and marketing.

“The Internet will not achieve its commercial potential if this new frontier becomes the Wild West of fraudulent schemes. These FTC cases target deception in on-line marketing, and our focus on this area makes clear that the laws prohibiting fraud also apply to the information superhighway.”

Jodie Bernstein, Federal Trade Commission

In taking these cases the FTC was primarily concerned with the potential for American citizens in all states to be defrauded by American companies via the Internet. There have been a number of other case in the US which involve cross-border transactions between states. For example, in 1996 Granite Gates, a commercial sports betting service based in Nevada, advertised on the World Wide Web. The Granite Web advertisements maintained the service it was offering was legal, but in the State of Minnesota sports betting is illegal. In the resulting case, the courts ruled that since the Granite advertisements were accessible by Minnesota residents, the State of Minnesota had jurisdiction to take consumer protection action against Granite Gates even though the company was based in another state.

There have also been US cases involving cross-border advertising from other countries. Virgin Atlantic Airways, which is based in the United Kingdom, advertised over the Internet an advanced purchase fare of $499 for travel between Newark and London. Even though the Virgin Web site advised customers to check with local travel agents to see if any taxes or charges applied, the US Department of Transport fined the British company $14,000 for failing to disclose clearly that a tax of $38.91 applied to each ticket.

“Whether or not the advertising met legal standards in Great Britain, and regardless of where Virgin Atlantic Airways’ Internet server was located, the US government successfully asserted jurisdiction over advertising that could be downloaded to a personal computer in the United States.”
Lewis Rose and John Feldman, “Internet Marketing”

A different, and perhaps more contemporary, view of the attitude of US courts to Internet advertising, with an Australian perspective, is offered by Steve White from the Melbourne law firm White SW Computer Law.

“One of the latest US decisions with respect to legal jurisdiction and the Internet, Cybersell Inc v. Cybersell Inc, suggests that if your Web site acts only as a means of advertising or as a source of information, the US Courts will not be able to assert jurisdiction. If, however, you sell goods and/or services over the Internet, it is possible that a US resident or business could issue legal proceedings in the US against you or your business. To reduce the risk of such litigation, you should consider having a requirement that the potential customer submits to the laws of Australia governing the agreement before the transaction has been completed.”

Steve White, “Web Site Development Agreements”

I am not aware of any actions taken by individual consumers in relation to Internet advertising, but there is considerable potential for false or misleading advertising, particularly by small operators with little or no corporate presence in the real world. The issue is of considerable concern to governments and consumer organisation in many countries, including the largest Internet market, the United States, and Australia.

Conclusion

The Internet is a new marketing frontier where the rules and regulations are rapidly evolving. In this environment, Internet advertisers need to be aware of the laws of their home country, as well as those which relate to other large market countries and international trade. In the article, “Internet Marketing”, US advertising lawyers Rose and Feldman, advise caution and suggest clients do all they can to ensure that proposed advertising material is acceptable in key countries. They also strongly advise the prominent display of disclaimers on Web sites, and where appropriate the site should clearly state the countries to which an offer can only apply.

As the market for Internet advertising grows so, unfortunately, will the number of advertisers who are neither honest or responsible, attracted by a medium which is able to reach a global market quickly and cheaply. As a result, the demands for consumer protection in relation to Internet advertising, particularly when it involves cross-border transactions will increase. These demands will only be adequately addressed by a mix of national laws and international agreements, combined with effective systems of self regulation on an industry-by-industry basis.

“The real problems are yet to emerge, as the bulk of consumers and merchants are currently kept out of the on-line marketplace by security concerns and payment difficulties. Once a secure, efficient and international model of digital payment is established it will be too late to step in and consider how best to impose regulation. Now is the time to recognise the promise and potential of electronic commerce and ensure it works for all Australian businesses, rather than leaving us behind, bound by the shackles of a paper based commercial system.”
Melissa De Zwart, “Electronic Commerce: Promises, Potential and Proposals”, University of NSW Law Journal.

References

  • Commonwealth of Australia Trade Practices Act at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/tpa1974149
  • The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “The global enforcement challenge – The enforcement of consumer protection laws in a global marketplace – Discussion Paper”, 1997.
  • The Law Reform Commission, “Choice of Law Rules”, discussion paper no. 44, (1990), p. 1.
  • Rose, L., & Feldman, J., “Internet Marketing: Practical Suggestions for International Advertising and Promotions”.
  • White, S., “Web Site Development Agreements”, Going Digital- Legal Issues for Electronic Commerce, Multimedia and the Internet, Fitzgerald A et al (eds), Prospect Media, St Leonards, 1998, p. 134.
  • De Zwart, M., “Electronic Commerce: Promises, Potential and Proposals”. University of NSW Law Journal 21(2), 1997.
  • Arent Fox Advertising Law Internet Site at http://www.advertisinglaw.com
  • Leonard, P., Leong, V., amp; Scott, B., “Advertising and Marketing on the Internet: Law and Regulation”. Internet Law Bulletin, 1(4), 1998.

Hyperlinks, Frames and Intellectual Property (1998)

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Contents

Introduction

At the beginning of 1996, the Web browser Netscape released Navigator 2, which introduced frames to the World Wide Web. Frames allow Web authors to create Web pages that are divided into several smaller windows, or frames, when they appear on the user’s screen. Each frame is an independently scrollable region of the screen and because it is independent, information downloaded into a frame only fills up that frame and does not effect the content of any surrounding frames. Frames are now a common feature of Web sites and all major browsers can frame.

Hypertext links, or hyperlinks, are an essential feature of the Web allowing users to move directly from one Web page to another, regardless of the where the new page is located in the real world. Virtually all Web pages contain hyperlinks and when a user activates one of these links with a mouse click, their Web browsers automatically establishes contact with the Web page referred to by the link and creates a copy of the material it contains, which is then displayed on the users screen. If the link is contained in a site which does not use frames then the new Web page replaces the page containing the originating link. However, in the case of a site with frames, the new site will only be displayed within the frame containing the originating link.

This paper is concerned with how the use of hyperlinks and frames by a Web site to present material from another Web site may infringe the rights of the originator Web site(s).

Within the Internet/legal industry most discussion of the issue has concerned the way framing sites use material from sites they wish to link with, and how this may infringe copyright. The framing site has to use the other site’s URL to establish a link, and in some cases the hyperlinks themselves consist of the name or logo of the other organisation, or specific pieces of identifying text from the other site, such as newspaper headlines. Since the potential for action based on infringement of copyright in an Internet context appears to be limited in many countries, legal writers and practitioners are widening their scope to include issues such as fair trading and trademark dilution in an effort to protect the property and rights of Web site owners.

Intellectual Property in Cyberspace

The World Wide Web is a new medium for publishing and disseminating information where the rules and conventions governing behaviour are still evolving. Linking a site in one country to a site in another, crossing territorial and judicial boundaries in the process, is a common occurrence. Protection of Intellectual Property rights in this new global environment is in a state of flux, although the Berne Convention and more recently the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) initiative administered by the World Trade Organisation address many of the key issues.

Technological advances are expanding the potential of this new medium at a rapid rate, but are also moving it further and further away from its real-world counterparts which have been the basis for most Intellectual Property law. To date, I am not aware of any reported legal decisions concerning the use of hyperlinks and frames. The issues involved however, have been central to a number of recent cases, which have either been settled out of court or are still proceeding. Several of these cases are considered below, and while most of the action has been in the United States, the first significant case to address this question emanated from Scotland.

The Shetland News

In 1996, The Shetland Times, a Scottish newspaper which publishes local, national and international news in both print and on its Web site took action against The Shetland News, an Internet newspaper, which also originates in Scotland. The later site contained a number of Shetland Times headlines which served as hyperlinks to articles on different Shetland Times Web pages. These hyperlinks provided direct access to each article, allowing the user to by pass the Shetland Times homepage. Hyperlinks such as these are often referred to as “deep” hyperlinks.

The managing director of The Shetland Times, Robert Wishart, maintained that by “incorporating our copyright material into their Internet news service, The Shetland News had infringed copyright”. Also, since The Shetland Times planned to use advertising on their homepage, the use of deep hyperlinks by the defendants, meant that such advertising would not be seen by visitors arriving through the defendants’ site resulting in a possible loss of revenue.

In the Scottish court on 24 October 1996, Lord Hamilton granted an Interim Interdict preventing the Shetland News from continuing to provide links to the Shetland Times Web site. At the time he stated that it was crucial that all access to material on the plaintiffs’ Web site should be obtained exclusively through their homepage. While the granting this order may suggest that Lord Hamilton felt that the use of deep hyperlinking could present a problem, it is important to note that the issue was never resolved in court.

In an online article, “Copyright Battles: The Shetlands”, the British legal writer Charles Oppenheim, counteracts what he believes was an over reaction to the granting of this interim interdict. In the view of Oppenheim any talk of the decision meaning the death of the Web is “Nonsense, the court did not consider the rights and wrongs of the case in terms of matters of law.”

Oppenheim argues that in terms of copyright law “… even storing the text of material temporarily on a hard disk is, technically, infringement.” But goes on to point out that for an infringement to be proved the material in question must be a “Literary Work”, as defined, and that none of the standard user permissions applied. He offers the opinion that use of the URL and the article headlines that were copied in this case was unlikely to be an infringement of copyright.

Furthermore, Oppenheim argues, that the “reporting of current events” by newspapers is fair dealing and that on the Web there is an implied licence to copy. “When someone opens a public WWW site, they must expect people to put links into their site, and for them to put links to other sites. The system was designed to work like this.”

On 11 November 1996, the plaintiffs and the defendants agreed to an out-of-court settlement, which allowed the Shetland News to continue linking to stories on The Shetland Times web site, but under certain conditions. Most significantly, The Shetland Times had to be prominently acknowledged as the source of the story. Deep linking however, could still be used, bypassing The Shetland Times homepage.

Mr Oppenheim believes that it is unlikely the Shetland Times would have been successful had the case gone to court. In his view, “… the defendants (would) have a 99.999% chance of winning their case.”

Total News

Total News is an Internet news site emanating from the USA, which contains links to a wide variety of news sources. The Web site is divided up into four independent frames.

A side frame contains a list of news gathering organisations, with each name acting as a hyperlink to the corresponding Web site. At the bottom of the screen there are frames containing the Total News logo and advertisements. The largest frame, which is in the centre of the screen, is the news window. By clicking on the name of a news source in the side frame, the content of that site is displayed in the news window. Importantly however, this material is adjacent to advertisements sold by Total News and the URL displayed is not the URL of the news source but the Total News URL.

In February 1997 a group of the news organisations featured on the Total News Web site, including the Washington Post, CNN and Reuters, filed a complaint against Total News Inc. There were nine claims including, misappropriation, trademark infringement, dilution of trademark, false advertising, unfair competition and tortious interference. The plaintiffs also maintain that by using hyperlinks to embed copyrighted material within its news frame, Total News is liable for copyright infringement.

The Total News case has been featured in several New York Law Journal articles. “Framing: Internet Equivalent to Pirating” by Alan Hartnick, for example, provides a good overview of the issues involved, but was written prior to the eventually out-of-court settlement. The article points out that the plaintiffs were not objecting to linking per se, but only to the partial linking that resulted from the use of frames by Total News, “… the implied licence to link does not permit any right to alter.”

Hartnick also looks at the question of misappropriation and how it intersects with copyright law in the United States. “Plaintiffs’ misappropriation complaint is that the defendants’ advertiser-supported “hot news” web site openly free-rides on plaintiffs’ efforts by simply lifting plaintiffs’ content wholesale and selling advertising based on proximity to that content.”

In considering the misappropriation claim, Hartnick draws an earlier, non-internet case, NBA v. Motorola , which concerned the real-time provision of “hot news” items, namely information on NBA games in progress. In this case Judge Winter found that there was no “free-riding” by Motorola in the collection and transmission of factual information.

In another New York Law Journal article, “Frame Liability Clouds the Internet’s Future”, the authors Kenneth Freeling and Joseph Levi consider both direct and contributory infringement of copyright in the Total News case. They maintain that a hyperlink merely directs the user to the address of another document on the Web and does not copy or modify the material itself. As a result the link provider “… should not be subject to direct copyright infringement liability.”

Although the link provider is facilitating the copying of the material by the user, in the view of Freeling and Levi the link provider is also not liable for contributory infringement, since the user has an implied right to view copyrighted material on the Web. Also, the doctrine of fair use would probably protect the user who downloads a Web page, since in the first instance the copy is not made for a commercial purpose, but to enable to the user to read the material contained on the Web page.

However, when it comes to the use of hyperlinks that are embedded within frames, the authors suggest that link providers may “… find it more difficult to defend against charges of infringement.” Although this is the situation with the Total News cases, the authors believe that by applying the same arguments as used in the non-frame situation, Total News is unlikely to be liable for either direct or contributory infringement of copyright.

The Total News case was dismissed on June 5, 1997 following an out of court settlement between the parties, which allows Total News to continue providing links to the Web pages of news organisations, but not within a frame. Also, the hyperlinks must be in plain text and can not include logos of the organisations. Total News continues to provide an Internet news service in much the same way as before this case, however, links to the organisations that took the action are no longer included on the Total News Web site.

Jeffery Kuester and Peter Nieves from the Franklin Pierce Law Center in the US provide a good summary of the case in Hyperlinks, Frames and Meta-Tags: An Intellectual Property Analysis”. In this article, which was written after a settlement had been reached, the authors provide an interesting view of the outcome. “While being far from conclusive, this settlement could suggest that hyperlinking in a framed arrangement could be actionable under at least one of the legal claims asserted in the Total News Compliant.”

Ticketmaster

“Hyperlinks, Frames and Meta-Tags: An Intellectual Property Analysis” by Jeffery Kuester and Peter Nieves offers an extensive overview of the main issues from an American Perspective. One of the hyperlink cases considered by the authors concerns a complaint filed by Ticketmaster against Microsoft in 1998 for improper use of Ticketmaster’s name and logo on a Microsoft Web site, “Seattle Sidewalk”.

Ticketmaster provides computerised ticket distribution services for producers and promoters of entertainment and sporting events. They maintain over 2,000 remote ticketing outlets and 16 phone centres in the US. They also have a prominent web site, but the link from “Seattle Sidewalk” bypassed the home page of this site, taking visitors directly to Ticketmaster’s event listings to purchase tickets.

Prior to the action by Ticketmaster, Microsoft had been negotiating to include links on the Sidewalk site to the Ticketmaster site. In the view of Kuester and Nieves this suggests that Microsoft may have been “… concerned about the legal basis for their intentions.” When negotiations broke down however, Microsoft established the links anyway. The authors also point out that a move by Ticketmaster to file an Amended Complaint that specifically addressed “deep” linking, suggests “… Ticketmaster suspects that merely linking to a homepage may not be actionable”.

The Amended Complaint by Ticketmaster states, “Some of Seattle Sidewalk’s links have circumvented the beginning pages of Ticketmaster’s Web site, which display advertisements, products and services of entities with which Ticketmaster contracts, and have linked directly to subsidiary pages of the Web site.”

Furthermore, Ticketmaster maintains, that the action by Microsoft amounts to the misappropriation of Ticketmaster’s property for the commercial use and gain by Microsoft. In addition, this unlawful use is diluting Ticketmaster’s name and trademark, and reducing the potential of the Ticketmaster site to generate advertising revenue.

Microsoft has responded to these claims and has also filed a counterclaim for a declaratory judgement seeking a determination on the legality of hyperlinking. In the view of Kuester and Nieves, “This counterclaim seems to place a large and realistic burden on the court since, according to the counterclaim, failing to recognise Microsoft’s use of hyperlinks as lawful would tend to place a stigma on hyperlinks in general and on their legality.”

Although the Ticketmaster v. Microsoft case is still to be resolved, the preliminary manoeuvres tend to suggest that both parties probably find hyperlinking acceptable, but are in considerable doubt about the use of deep hyperlinks.

Fort Wayne

An article, “Lawsuit May Determine Whether Framing is Thieving” by Carl Kaplan in the New York Times’ Cyber Law Journal, features a more recent case involving two newspapers and a community Web site in the Midwestern town of Fort Wayne.

The newspapers, The Journal Gazette and The News-Sentinel, allege Ft-Wayne.com, linked to newspaper articles in an improper way. Specifically they were concerned about three issues which are common to a number of other cases. The newspapers maintain that when the articles were presented within the Ft-Wayne frame they did not appear as they would had the reader reached the newspaper sites directly, also the articles were surrounded by the Ft-Wayne logo, URL and advertising, and finally, by displaying the articles in this way the site creates an impression there is a relationship between it and the newspapers.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs, D. Randall Brown, said his clients did not object to the newspaper sites being linked to by any other Web site, but did object to the practice of framing. In essence, the framer “… rides on the coattails of the newspaper’s reporters and editors”. And, is ‘looting’ the property of the newspapers. The action by the newspapers extends beyond the Web site and its proprietor to include the developer of the site and the Internet Service Provider.

Ft-Wayne.com maintains it is providing a free community service through its Web site and stopped framing the day after the lawsuit was filed as a demonstration of its goodwill. The plaintiffs however, appear determined to continue with their action and so this case may ultimately provide a decision by a US court on the legality of framing.

Conclusions

The Internet and World Wide Web present us with a new publishing and marketing paradigm. The use of hyperlinks and frames enables a Web site developed and ‘housed’ in one country, to incorporate material from other Web pages into its display and simultaneously present those materials as its own to a global market.

While many Web site proprietors are happy with this situation, and hyperlinking could be fairly considered to be an essential feature of the Web, the lack of any clear legal guidelines has resulted in allegations of online ‘looting’ or ‘pirating’ by some Web proprietors.

In general, copyright law in common law countries like Australia, are primarily concerned with protecting the economic interests of the copyright owner, often the originator of a work. In essence, these laws help ensure that the originator of a work is rewarded for their efforts, thereby creating an environment which is conducive to the exploration of ideas and the development of new works.

The Web however, has the potential to undermine this situation. It transcends national boundaries and is relatively anonymous. Web sites can be developed and presented to a global market quickly and cheaply with very few restraints, and the technology of framing enables the easy and seamless incorporation of material from other Web pages. Furthermore, since no courts anywhere in the world have made any significant decisions on these matters, there are no real guide lines as to what is acceptable behaviour.

In the view of some Internet and legal writers, the answer for copyright owners worried that their material will be copied on the Web is simple: Don’t put the material up on the Web. While this attitude may have been adequate when the Web was a fringe activity, it can no longer be the case, the Web is now a major means of disseminating information with significant economic power.

While recognising the new culture that is emerging among Internet and Web users, I believe that site owners who prepare new material for publication on the Web need to be able to protect their material. Without this protection it will be hard for them to exploit the full economic potential of their material and the incentive to produce new material for the Web will be reduced leading eventually to a decline in the quality and quantity of new link targets.

The articles and cases considered in this paper outline the increasing concern some Web proprietors have with the use of frames, and suggest that those wishing to protect their material from exploitation by others will find little help in copyright law. Instead, as indicated, they are seeking legal protection through other means, such as national laws concerning fair trading, misappropriation, passing off and trade mark protection.

References

Reflections on Site Usability and the State of Flow (1998)

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Ccontents

Background

The answer to the question how many people are using the Internet and World Wide Web is like the answer to the question, “How long is a piece of string?” It depends!

It depends on who you ask. It depends on exactly when you ask the question. And, it depends on whether you mean the number of computers with Internet access or the number of people using that access.

One thing is for sure, the number is large and is growing every day. Work by research organisations, such as GVU and Forresters Research, suggests that the number of computers connected to the Internet has doubled every year since 1982. While it is not possible to know the exactly how many people are using the net at this point in time, it would be fair to say that by the end of 1998 the number will be approaching 100 million world-wide.

For many business organisations the Web has become an exciting, but largely elusive, commercial frontier. ‘We know it’s there. We know it’s big. But, what can it do for us?’

Increasingly marketing academics and practitioners are turning their attention to the Internet and World Wide Web, and while estimations of the value of electronic commerce vary greatly, most are confident that it will exceed $50 billion by the year 2000.  In the Journal of Marketing (July 1996) Hoffman and Novak provide a good overview of the marketing implications of the Web. Many commercial Web sites however, are failing in this new environment and the problem is often poor site usability. Forrester Research recently reported that bad Web design could result in a company losing about 50% of potential sales.

In this article I’ve drawn on a range of online and print resources. In particular, the work of web pioneers, Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool and web consultant Keith Instone. Since much of their research is already published on the Web, I will confine myself to providing a brief overview of their work with links to more detailed information. I’ve also made extensive use of the work done by Professors Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak from the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University. Many thanks to these people and the many others who are working to improve our understanding of the Internet.

Failure of Commercial Web Sites

“On the average, the Web doesn’t work: when you think of something to do on the Web, the expected outcome is that you will fail.” So wrote Jakob Nielsen in a recent Alertbox feature, citing three recent studies by different researchers to back up his claim. Nielsen believes a major source of the problem is a failure to appreciate the importance of site usability in Web design. He estimates that “90% of commercial sites have poor usability.”

Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering has been looking closely at how people use a Web site to obtain information. Preliminary findings from a study, which required testers to compare facts available from a series of sites that contained the information being sought, are presented in an article Surprises on the Web by Spool. In general, the testers found the task frustrating and many were unsuccessful. Spool reported that, “All the sites we tested appeared less complete to users immediately after they attempted the tasks involving fact comparisons, and they also rated the quality of the information lower for the site.”

The apparent problems and frustration many people have in using the Web raise the obvious questions: Why do they continue to do so? And, why are the number of Web users increasing so rapidly?

Part of the answer to these questions lie in the fact that different people use the Web for different reasons as Spool indicates in his book “Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide”. Under the heading, “Information Retrieval is Different than Surfing” Spool writes. “We didn’t study surfing, the other primary use of Web sites. When users surf, they are just browsing, clicking whatever looks most interesting or ‘cool,’ and content may not be the driving force in coolness.”

While the media often uses the image of the ‘surfer in search of the cool’ as a convenient stereotypical way of describing Web use, the reality is quite different. During his latest study on Web usability Spool found that most users were saying, “I don’t want an experience, I just want information.” Results of this study are contained in a Webreview report on a paper presented by Spool at the c/net’s Web builder conference in April 1998.

The focussed or purposeful Web user will be the primary target for most commercial Web sites, and yet it is these sites which are often the most difficult to use. So the question remains. Why are people continuing to use commercial sites? In his article The Web Use Paradox, Jakob Nielsen offers several explanations, including this observation. “Even though 90% of sites are bad, users don’t spend 90% of their time at bad sites. People only visit a bad site once but become loyal users of good sites.”

Although the general performance of commercial sites is poor at the moment, increasing awareness of Web-user behaviour and the importance of site usability will improve this situation.

Usability

The editor of “Usability in Practice”, Michael Wiklund, describes usability as a cumulative attribute of a product. “When a product development team designs a product, it tries to include the features people need to accomplish tasks, present those features in a manner that people intuitively grasp and find efficient to use in the long term. They also attempt to eliminate the potential for critical, design-induced mistakes and to include design qualities that make people feel good about using the product.” (p.7)

Wiklund credits the software industry with raising consumer awareness of the importance of usability. He says that it has done more than any other industry to expose consumers to usability engineered products and in the process has increased consumer intolerance for hard-to-use products. Given the close alliance between the software industry and the Internet, it is therefore surprising that many Web site designers and proprietors appear to pay only scant attention to the importance of usability.

This observation is underscored by the Alertbox feature about the failure of corporate web sites. Reporting on a recent study by Forrester Research, Jakob Nielsen writes, “Forrester interviewed 25 executives in charge of various companies’ Internet efforts. Most had very few design goals& 24% of sites conducted usability testing: this is more than I would have expected and probably reflects Forrester’s bias toward bigger and more well-funded projects. (Of course, this data implies that ? of large sites are managed without any usability data: essentially poking blindly into the design space).”

Web consultant, Keith Instone, in one of his Web Review articles, User Test Your Website maintains having a URL is no longer enough for doing business on the Web. Companies must have sites that are easy to navigate, and where visitors can actually find what they are after. A study of the Internet Travel Network site by Instone provided a useful insight into the importance of usability.

For Instone, along with Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, the best, and perhaps only, way to understand the full web experience is to study people using the Web.

Jared Spool is often credited with being the first person to develop a comprehensive set of guidelines for web design. During 1995 he asked testers to find information from 9 different Web sites. Spool observed the testers, measured how successful they were at finding the information and then asked them to rate the sites afterwards on issues like information quality. This study became the basis for the book “Web Site Usability: A Designers Guide”.

In essence, where information retrieval is the primary consumer task Spool found that;

  • Graphic design elements had no significant correlation, either positive or negative, with users’ success.
  • Most users examined text links before considering image links. Also, the better users could predict where a link would lead, the greater the likelihood of success.
  • Sites where navigation and content were inextricably linked were the most successful. Generic links as used in “shell” sites were less effective since users rarely got what they expected.
  • When looking for information users are much more focused than they are when surfing. Design elements included to attract surfers often proved distractions during information retrieval tasks.

In the Surprises on the Web article, Spool reports on further research into site usability, which found that users often ignored the content of animation, becoming frustrated with the delays it caused, and that Imagemaps could result in unforeseen navigation problems for consumers. When looking at the relationship between the number of jumps (link transitions) and user satisfaction, Spool found that, “When users made more jumps during a task, they felt better at the end of the task, and they had a higher perception of the quality of the site.”

At the c/net conference referred to earlier, Spool describes how people find information on the Web by foraging in much the same way as hunter-gathers foraged for food, balancing effort with reward. “According to Spool, information essentially has a “scent” and as users link from page to page they pick up the scent of the data they’re searching for.” Since users seem to know when they are on the scent but can’t say why, Spool looked at identifying those attributes which made them feel confident they were on the right track.

Usability Evaluation

Jakob Nielsen is probably best known for his bi-weekly Alertbox column and for the concept of heuristic evaluation.

Heuristic evaluation was developed by Nielsen and Rolf Molich in 1990 as a usability engineering method for finding problems in user interface design so that problems could be addressed during the design process. Nielsen and Molich originally proposed a set of 249 usability elements which they called heuristics. Since its introduction heuristic evaluation has been used effectively in a diverse range of industries which require human-computer interaction (eg banking). Further information is contained in the article How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation by Jakob Nielsen.

More recently Nielsen has refined the concept and reduced the set of heuristic to the 10 most important, which have direct relevance to the Web.

  1. Visibility of system status
  2. Match between system and the real world
  3. User control and freedom
  4. Consistency and standards
  5. Error prevention
  6. Recognition rather than recall
  7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
  8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
  9. Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors
  10. Help and documentation

See Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics also Keith Instone’s annotated list for information about the use of these heuristics in Web site evaluation.

Heuristic evaluation is well suited to the task of assessing Web site usability. In essence, it involves a small number of evaluators (Nielsen recommends 3 – 5), working with a site for about an hour and evaluating how that site performs in reference to the ten heuristics.

Different evaluators find different problems, and though some problems are so obvious they are identified by almost everybody, there are also problems that are found by very few evaluators. Each evaluator rates the significance of each problem found, often on a scale of 1 -5, ranging from no problem to a usability catastrophe.

When the results of the different evaluators are collated they provide a good indication of the site’s usability. If all evaluators agree that something is a catastrophe, then clearly rectifying that problem will be a high priority, conversely if something is only a problem for one evaluator then it is likely to be of less significance and may even just be the result of operator-error.

Web site designers and proprietors should make greater use of heuristic evaluation. They are easy to set up and provide quick feedback on problem areas. In addition, when compared to the costs of developing and maintaining a Web site, heuristic evaluation is comparatively cheap, in the order of $5000 – $10,000 for a commercial Web site.

Go with the Flow

The Web is a hypermedia computer-mediated environment (CME), and as such presents a new marketing paradigm, requiring new models of marketing communications. The Web, according to Hoffman and Novak “is a many-to-many mediated communications model in which consumers can interact with the medium, firms can provide content to the medium, and in the most radical departure from traditional marketing environments, consumers can provide commercially-oriented content to the medium. In this mediated model, the primary relationships are not between sender and receiver, but rather with the CME with which they interact.”

Much of our understanding of the way humans behave in a CME like the Web stems for the concept of flow, first introduced by Csikszentmihalyi (1977). Csikszentmihalyi described people as being in a flow state when they became totally absorbed in their activity. “This mode is characterized by a narrowing of the focus of awareness, so that irrelevant perceptions and thoughts are filtered out; by loss of self-consciousness; by a responsiveness to clear goals and unambiguous feedback; and by a sense of control over the environment.” (p.72)

The flow construct has been expanded and refined over the last 25 years by researchers concerned with increasing our understanding of human-computer interactions. A good summary of this development is contained in Modeling the Structure of the Flow Experience Among Web Users by Thomas Novak, Donna Hoffman and Yui-Fai Yung (1997). The article builds on earlier work by Hoffman and Novak (Journal of Marketing 1996) which defined the flow experience “as the state occurring during network navigation, which is (1) characterized by a seamless sequence of responses facilitated by machine interactivity, (2) intrinsically enjoyable, (3) accompanied by a loss of self-consciousness, and (4) self-reinforcing.” (p.57) Consumers in the flow state are often so preoccupied with the task that their field of focus narrows to the screen before them and their awareness of time is greatly diminished.

It is now also generally recognised that for the flow experience to occur users must perceive a balance between their skills and the challenges of the activity, and that both their skills and the challenges must be above a critical threshold.

Most computer users have an inherent understanding of the flow concept, either from their own experience or from watching someone else totally involved in a computer-related task such as unravelling the mysteries of a new piece of software. The marketing implications of the flow construct are perhaps less obvious and require a closer look at some of the underlying conditions that are necessary for flow to occur.

Marketing Implications of Flow

The ability of a commercial Web site to provide its users with the flow experience has a number of positive marketing benefits. As well as enhancing the enjoyment of a site and the amount of time a consumer spends there, flow can lead to increased consumer learning, exploratory behaviour and the likelihood of repeat visits to a site.

The need for a perceived balance between skills and challenges by the consumer presents Web site designers with an interesting quandary. According to Hoffman and Novak, we need to know whether and at what point in the process consumers are likely to become bored (eg when navigation is not sufficiently challenging) or anxious (eg when it is too difficult), since both states can increase the chances of a user leaving the site.

This observation has to be tempered by the knowledge that consumers come at all levels of skill and will visit different Web sites for different reasons. For example, if a consumer is after a specific piece of information, such as the price of an airfare, then any challenge to finding that information could be detrimental. On the other hand, the threshold for challenge is likely to be much greater for those visiting a games site, or for users surfing in search something “cool”.

Ghani and Deshpande, “Task Characteristics and the Experience of Optimal Flow in Human-Computer Interaction” (The Journal of Psychology), also agree that there is an optimal level of challenge relative to a certain skill level. “If the challenges are too high, the individual feels a lack of control over the environment and becomes anxious and frustrated. If the challenges are too low the individual loses interest.”(382). They also found that a sense of being in control was key determinant of flow, and that that flow was linked to exploratory behaviour, which in turn was linked to the extent of computer use. Within the web environment these findings suggest that by enabling users to feel in control of the navigation process a site is able to enhance the experience of flow. As a result, consumers are likely to stay at the site longer exploring more of the options it contains.

As indicated, consumers in a flow state focus their attention on a limited stimulus field, filtering out irrelevant thoughts and perceptions. The sensory or cognitive curiosity of consumers is also aroused in the flow state, making them more receptive to varied novel and surprising stimuli. While this heightened state of curiosity can result in greater exploratory behaviour, inappropriate stimuli which conflict with the highly focused attention of consumers could break the flow experience.

Within the context of a commercial site, the use of complex animation and banner advertisements, especially those with visually arresting graphics, may diminish rather than enhance the flow state, leading to consumer dissatisfaction. Jared Spool found that users generally don’t view graphics as fun and that some graphics can directly annoy them. The level of distraction often resulted in users covering animations with their hands in order to better see the text.

Conclusion

The Web is a new commercial environment, presenting marketers with unique opportunities and challenges, which it appears many are failing to meet. Many leading web researchers are pointing the finger at poor site usability as the main problem. By outlining some of the work done by Jared Spool in developing a comprehensive set of Web design guidelines, and by Jakob Nielsen in providing an effective means of assessing site usability, this article hopes to have contributed in some way to rectifying this situation.

In order to understand more about the problems of site usability this article also examined some of the basic determinants of the way humans behave in a computer mediated environment. In particular it looked at the early work of Csikszentmihalyi in developing the concept of flow in human-computer interactions and the contributions made by Hoffman and Novak in using the flow construct to enhance our understanding of the Web.

In conclusion, I believe that a greater understanding of the need to facilitate the flow experience for Web users and the importance of site usability by Web site designers and proprietors are essential for the long term usability and viability of commercial Web sites.

References

Virtual Classroom Project Report (1997)

by
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Paper presented at JALT Conference,
Hamamatsu, Japan 1997

Contents

Introduction

The aim of the Virtual Classroom project is to create an environment that will help stimulate purposeful communication between English language learners across the globe.

In the real-world, language teaching is becoming increasingly concerned with giving students the ability to use their new language spontaneously to express their thoughts, needs and desires. In the classroom context, the process is greatly enhanced when the provision of new language skills occurs in a supportive environment where these new skills are allowed to develop though use and experimentation.

In the Virtual Classroom we are attempting to approximate the shared and supportive environment of a real-world class. As a starting point we felt that it was necessary for all the participants in the Virtual Classroom to use the same course materials, since this would provide them with some common ground regardless of their geographic distance from each other. The trial phases of the Virtual Classroom were restricted therefore to learners attending language classes using the same published course text, ‘Words Will Travel’.

The classroom material is supplemented by extra activities available from the Virtual Classroom pages of our web site via the internet. Student responses to these Virtual Classroom activities are also presented on web pages in the site for other students (and teachers) to discuss and comment on.

Core Materials – ‘Words Will Travel’

The core course material for the Virtual Classroom is Level 1 of ‘Words Will Travel’, a video-based communicative English language teaching course. This intermediate level course is currently used throughout Australia and in Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Korea.

One of the main reasons for the great success of ‘Words Will Travel’ in the classroom is the way the video drama creates for teachers and students the shared context necessary for purposeful and meaningful communication. With the Virtual Classroom we aim to take this shared context beyond the walls of individual classrooms and into cyberspace.

Virtual Classroom Trials

There have been two trials of the Virtual Classroom, involving more than 500 students from 19 classes in 6 countries; Australia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the United States of America. My sincere thanks to all the teachers and students who participated in these trials for their support and patience and, above all, for their feedback which contained a wealth of suggestions and ideas.

The first trial ran from October to December, 1996. The second trial started in May 1997. Most participants had completed the trial by July, with the exception of two groups of students who remained until October.

First Trial

During the first trial we decided interchanges should be on a class to class (rather than an individual student to student) basis, with each class teacher acting as the mediator between the students in their real-world class and the activity in the Virtual Classroom.

Teachers printed out Virtual Classroom activities from the web site for their classes. Students then worked through an activity and the teacher sent in their responses via a standardised electronic form. We then posted the responses in the Active Classroom page of the web site. Teachers printed out the contributions from other classes for their students to discuss and comment on.

In order to ameliorate the problem of restricted individual student access to the Virtual Classroom, we offered to pass on e-mail addresses so that students could contact each other directly. We also included in the Virtual Classroom a variety of open-ended activities and joint activities to provide the stimulus and basis for direct exchanges between participating classes and students. We hoped that after establishing contact through work on shared activities, individual students in different classes would seek each other out to exchange ideas, firstly about core course activities and later about more general issues that arose.

New Materials

Twenty-eight new activities were prepared for the first trial, drawing on the context provided by the ‘Words Will Travel’ video drama and accompanying audio and print materials. Broadly speaking, these Virtual Classroom activities fell into four categories.

1. Getting to know you activities

Two new activities in Unit 1 provided students from participating classes with an opportunity to learn more about each other. We hoped that this early exchange of information would help develop a collegiate environment in the Virtual Classroom.

2. Extension of core class work

Most of the activities extend the existing core classroom activities. For example, the video drama in ‘Words Will Travel’ is set in a small country hotel called ‘Treetops’, which is owned and operated by June Wilson. From the video and print material students know that eight years earlier June Wilson’s father and her husband went fishing together in a small boat but did not return.

The answer to the riddle of what happened to the men can only be found in the Virtual Classroom. In an ‘information gap’ activity two classes are matched. Each is sent a different cloze passage of the story, ‘What the Seabirds Saw’. The information missing in one cloze passage can be found in the other. The partner classes work together via e-mail to complete the clozes and find the answer.

3. ‘What’s Your Opinion’

The object of the ‘What’s Your Opinion’ activities contained in each unit was to explore the potential of the Virtual Classroom as a forum for the free exchange of student opinions. Rather than setting specific tasks, each of these activities offered several controversial statements relating to the unit being studied. Teachers were asked to encourage their students to discuss the statements, formulate and post opinions and compare them with the opinions of other classes. Our aim was to stimulate the creation of ‘threads’ that students could follow.

4. Exploration of cross-cultural issues

Many of the activities in the Virtual Classroom allow for cross-cultural comparisons on a range of issues, including the use of titles and nick-names, giving advice and compliments, crime and punishment, and even food and cooking.

Outcomes

We had considerable difficulty finding classes to participate in the first trial of the Virtual Classroom. Unfortunately the scheduled starting date for the trial did not fit in with the academic timetables of most of the institutions that had initially expressed an interest in joining. Also, a few teachers who were interested in the project had not used ‘Words Will Travel’ before and were reluctant to commit themselves to a trial using unfamiliar materials.

When it came to running the trial, the variations in academic year from country to country was a significant problem. The considerable differences in course and class lengths as well as the teaching styles of participating institutions also caused some difficulties.

Building the Virtual Classroom around common course materials for all participating classes worked very well. The video drama at the heart of ‘Words Will Travel’ successfully achieved our aim of generating a shared context.

We relied greatly on feedback from participating teachers to ascertain the level of student interest and involvement in the project since the number of student responses, or postings, displayed in the active classroom area of Virtual Classroom site varied from activity to activity. For example, although the information gap activity, ‘What the Seabirds Saw’, referred to earlier, was one of the most popular with students, we did not post any of the responses we received because general access to information contained in the clozes would have compromised the activity for other students.

On the other hand, the preceding activity, ‘What Do You Think Happened’, which involved students speculating about the fate of the missing men, generated eleven postings that took seven pages to print. Many of the contributions were about myths and legends which have been used by different societies to explain the disappearance of people at sea. Several of the participating teachers reported using the responses of other classes as the basis for cross-cultural work in their classrooms.

Seven of the nine participating teachers reported great benefits from using the Virtual Classroom, particularly as a way of stimulating discussion on a range of cross-cultural issues. There was also considerable initial interest from students. However, the lack of direct student access to the Virtual Classroom saw this interest begin to wane.

The first trial clearly demonstrated the need for direct student involvement in the Virtual Classroom and the process of making postings. Without this involvement students are likely to see the internet as just another resource for the teacher, to be photocopied and handed out in class.

Initially we felt that activity in the Virtual Classroom would be largely self-generating, allowing us to automate the process of collecting and posting contributions in the web site. As a result of the first trial we now realise that, if the Virtual Classroom is to be a dynamic learning environment, we will need to take a more pro-active role, stimulating and moderating postings where necessary.

Second Trial

After the first trial we decided to make a number of significant changes to the Virtual Classroom before commencing the next trial. In particular, we wanted to greatly increase the opportunities for direct involvement by participating students in the project.

We re-designed the second trial so that most of the postings to the Virtual Classroom would be made by students and not the teachers, as was the case with the first trial. However, since we were not in a position to process individual postings from possibly hundreds of students for each activity, we asked the teachers of participating classes to break their classes up into a maximum of eight groups with no fewer than three students in each group. To increase the opportunity for speaking practice we suggested teachers require the students in each group to speak only English when negotiating both the use of the computer and the group response to the task at hand.

During the first trial all interactions with the Virtual Classroom were administered via the class teacher and so the instructions were written for teachers. Since the second trial was to be more accessible to students all the Virtual Classroom information was rewritten. We also prepared different teacher and student instructions for each activity. These were presented in separate Teacher and Student areas of the web site. The responses of student groups to each activity were presented in the Active Classroom area of the site.

Although all the formal Virtual Classroom work was done by each student group working as a unit, there were plenty of opportunities (and the support) for individual students wishing to make direct contact with other students.

The Virtual Classroom web pages were re-designed to make them easier to use. A change in the menu structure enhanced the speed of access to specific activities while greater use of hypertext allowed students to follow ideas and threads within an activity more easily.

Materials

Twelve new activities were designed for the second trial of the Virtual Classroom to help foster net literacy and the development of World Wide Web research skills. In addition, most of the existing first trial activities were re-worked to allow for a higher degree of interaction between individual students and groups of students.

e-mail

Activities in Unit 1 gave students an introduction to the basics of e-mail, first using a provided e-mail form and then using the standard e-mail software they have on their computer. During these early exchanges each student group contacted two or three other groups by e-mail. They learnt more about members of the other groups and had an opportunity to obtain the personal e-mail addresses of other participants.

World Wide Web

An activity in Unit 2 introduced students to the World Wide Web. Students were shown how to find the answers to questions about several places Yoshi and Tomoko Ito, two of the characters in ‘Words Will Travel’, visited while on holidays in Cairns, Australia. An activity in Unit 3 builds on this knowledge by introducing students to a search engine and then asking them to use it to find the lyrics to a popular song.

Listservs

In a similar way, students were also introduced to exchange forums like Dave’s ESL cafe and the Student SL Lists, and shown how to use them as means of finding key-pals or obtaining information.

Shared research

A series of shared activities later in the course give students an opportunity to apply the Internet skills they have learned for joint research and collaboration with others in the Virtual Classroom. Two student groups from different countries work together using available resources, including the WWW and student exchange forums, to prepare recipes for national dishes from countries other than their own.

Outcomes

43 student groups from ten classes participated in the second trial, which started in May 1997. Once again, variations in the academic years of different countries was a major problem. It was also difficult to accommodate the wide differences in teaching schedules of the institutions involved. For example, students in some of the participating groups attended English classes for as little as 1 hour per week as part of a full time course in some other field of study, while others attended intensive 5 week courses doing more than 20 hours English language study a week.

During the trial we found there was a wide variation in the language skills of the students from different institutions. Although “Words Will Travel” is an intermediate level course and all the student groups came from classes which were considered to be at this level, the student groups from two institutions found the core course materials a little difficult, while the experience of those at another institution was the opposite. For most of the student groups, however, the core course materials and the extra activities in the Virtual Classroom were at an appropriate level.

These variations in course schedules and language skills meant that it was always going to be difficult for two student groups to establish an on-going working relationships that would continue for a number of activities. We tried to alleviate this problem by providing activities that would help groups combine on an ad-hoc basis for individual activities. Several of the participating teachers however, felt that their students were spending too much time trying to find groups with which to do activities.

With one exception, all the class teachers of the participating student groups actively supported the project helping to facilitate the involvement of their students in the project and providing valuable feedback to us. Most of the student groups from these classes participated in the Virtual Classroom until the end of their institution’s course.

As already indicated, the second trial of the Virtual Classroom was much more student driven than the first. Rather than the teacher acting as a mediator, student groups interacted directly with the web site and each other. This change to the design of the project achieved the aim of enhancing student interest and involvement in the process. Several of the student groups continued with the Virtual Classroom activities out of class hours using their own computers at home. In the case of one class in Korea, the students were so keen to continue with the project at the end of the semester that their teacher agreed to work with them for several hours a week during the vacation doing the class work necessary for them to continue making postings.

A more learner orientated process also had some downsides. It was a greater imposition on teachers to moderate the activity of a number of student groups rather than the class as a whole, as was the case with the first trial. In addition, when it was the teachers who were obtaining the activities and responses from the Virtual Classroom web site, it was easier for them to expand on issues as they emerged through directed class discussion. For example, the activity ‘What Do You Think Happened’ in the first trial resulted in dynamic exchanges in the Virtual Classroom which teachers were able to use in their real-world classes to raise a number of cross-cultural issues. In the second trial, however, this activity was not as successful. Nearly all the student groups responded to this activity with a list of possible reasons for why the men might have disappeared. Few student groups commented on the responses of other groups. As a result, there was no on-going exchange of opinions and ideas for teachers to build on.

It was very tempting to strive for the highest level of sophistication when we designed the Virtual Classroom. However, in order to accommodate internet users with very basic machines and browser software, we limited the complexity of the site and trial protocol to enable access to the Virtual Classroom by as wide a range of people as possible.

Although no one experienced problems accessing the Virtual Classroom, some students with a high level of computer and web expertise (and the machines and software to go with it) found the simplicity of the site and the limitations we imposed frustrating. One of the teachers was also frustrated by our use of faxes to distribute certain resources which were ‘for the teacher’s eyes only’ and/or which contained formatting that could be lost if transmitted by email. He suggested that we should try sending such information in an HTML file attached to an email sent directly to the teacher. The teacher could then view the file using a web browser. While this would clearly allow us to send formatted material, it still leaves us with the problem of ‘sensitive’ information where teachers and students are using the same machine.

Teachers generally reported a high degree of student satisfaction with the project and most asked to be included in any future trials of the Virtual Classroom. As with the first trial, most teachers felt that the use of the video based course “Words Will Travel” to provide a shared context for all participating students worked very well.

English Language Systems

15 October 1997