Toward Effective and Compelling Instruction for High School eCommerce Students: Results from a Small Field Study

This paper describes an instructional development effort to create effective and compelling instruction for eCommerce students. Results from a small field study inform the development project. Four high school students in an eCommerce course completed the standalone tutorial developed to teach them how to create a web page in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The four participants were also interviewed in an attempt to determine what motivates them to learn. Researcher observations of completed web pages indicated that the tutorial helped the four participants learn introductory HTML tags and, except for one revealing instance, they mastered the content without instructor assistance. Future work to develop an automated system for determining and correcting learner misconceptions evident in dysfunctional hyperlinks would provide additional support to learners. Lastly, this paper discusses implications of the field study results for the design and implementation of effective and compelling instruction.