Resumen de CHEMnet: Analysis of the Use of Special Features and Multimedia Elements of an Online Chemistry Course
CHEMnet is an online chemistry course that is available in English and in German. Although the course has been written predominantly for first-year university students of chemistry and related disciplines, it is proving to be of interest to high-school students. CHEMnet is a database-oriented application and each user is registered in the database, which allows for user-specific analysis of the different user groups. CHEMnet includes special features, such as pictorial links providing multimedia elements, for example videos and simulations, and text pages with specific information. The analysis of the use of multimedia elements shows that their use is dependent on their accessibility. The use of special features is dependent on the total number of accessed pages ("page-views"), and further analysis shows that the use of pages that need no plug-ins correlates with the total number of accessed pages ("page views"). In contrast, the use of multimedia elements such as 3D VRML simulations, which need a plug-in that is dependent on the operating system and on the VRML-version, does not correlate with the total number of accessed pages.
