He suggests students should be encouraged to think rather than just react. While these issues fall primarily within the area of responsibility of the instructional designer of the IMC package they could easily be influenced by the IMC author and his or her concept of interactivity. For the IMC author the challenge here is to appreciate concepts like Hypermedia where the structure of a learning resource needs to be highly flexible yet economically viable in terms of file size and access time. They need to be aware that presenting and manipulating text and images in certain ways will influence learning outcomes. Hooper reported that this question divided the conference participants between those who believed this element essential and those who felt it was quite inappropriate and should be avoided.
Effective communication is dependent upon a common understanding of terms and concepts.
This debate is still in progress. Buttons must look like buttons and buttons must be able to be pressed. Good interface design is often simple and elegant. The current concerted push to get more CD-ROM players into the global computer market may be the very action necessary to stimulate a rapid expansion in demand for IMC products by providing a relatively cheap and commonly available platform from which they can be run. Romiszowski terms this an implementation and management issue.