Abstract
Acquiring knowledge quickly is an essential issue for the Internet navigators who get used to scan the online contents have little time to get knowledge in the information overloaded age. Four-frame webcomics have been popular on the Internet and bring readers enjoyment and positive moods. Additionally, Chinese culture has been widespread that both Chinese and non-Chinese people would have great opportunities to experience in their daily life. On the basis of multimedia and visual theories, the researcher developed hyperlink-based four-frame webcomics of Chinese lunar festivals to facilitate learners’ learning about Chinese traditional culture online. The researcher set up a website with six webcomics, and recorded the participants’ viewing paths. The experiment started from Oct. in 2011 to Jan. 2012, and 33 participants from different countries volunteered to take part in. Pre-test, post-test, and evaluation questionnaire were conducted for evaluating the effectiveness of the webcomics. The results show that participants were attracted by the visual representations and found hyperlinks in the webcomics with positive moods. They made their improvement especially for the learners with lower cognitions proved their knowledge gained in a short period of time. Furthermore, parts of the participants expected to learn more about Chinese lunar festivals with further learning motivations. After analyzing the results and feedback, the researcher concluded the following design guidelines: a) design the conversations up to 3 sentences in each frame, b) use the strategy of storytelling to present learning contents, c) simplify images and visualize each key elements concisely, d) utilize hyperlinks directed to further learning information and e) present at least one key element each frame. To sum up, the hyperlink-based four-frame webcomics had potential on learning at a glance. Moreover, the researcher noticed that the hyperlink functions would motivate the participants to do further learning, and visual representations could present abstract learning contents concretely.