Askplorer is a web-based software program that uses interactive video-clips. The interactive feature is not available in other media such as a book and regular video. Its instructional model consists of four steps: sensing, trial, learning and mastery. A user gradually learns the contents throughout the course of instruction. The main part of the software is the trial and leaning steps. In this section, each step is explained.

Sensing
     The “sensing” step is an introductory part to get a user prepared for the main parts. In this step, a user watches video clips of different people whom they can ask about colleges. These people include an undergraduate admissions officer, student college tour guide, college student, resident assistant, and high school college counselor. There are two purposes to show these videos. First, they teach a user what he/she can ask about colleges. This is in response to the fact that prospective college students do not know what to ask about. Second, they imply how to ask those questions. Although it is not explicitly stated, a user gets a sense how to ask questions from the videos.

Trial and Learning
     In the “trial” and “learning” parts, a user interacts with “practical experience videos”. “Practical experience videos” are half role-play video-clips. In each video-clip, a high school student is asking questions to one of the people who were introduced in the “sensing” step. The scenarios of the “practical experience videos” were created with the participant students based on their own interests and the Askplorer’s strategies. The video-clips are “half” role-play because the interviewees do not know the scenarios and the strategies used in the scenarios. The purpose of not writing a whole scenario was to make the interaction natural.
     
      In the “trial” step, a user’s work is to analyze a “practical experience video”. The user is supposed to try to find questioning strategies with his/her own experiences, knowledge, and the “sense” he received in the “sensing” step. The video is designed as clickable. When clicked, Askplorer prompts the user to type his/her comment about the question asked in the video (Figure 1). The comment is posted and later compared with expert comments that are made on the same video. This part is using learning theories of problem oriented acquisition and novice expert model.

  
      After finishing the work, the user moves on to the “learning” step and watches the same video. The difference from the “trial” step is that an expert comments on the same video this time. At a moment when the expert finds it important, the “practical experience video” pauses and the expert video-clip plays on top of the “practical experience video” (Figure 2). When the comment video is finished, the summary is posted next to the user’s comments.

Mastery
     In the “mastery” step, a user is supposed to create his/her own questioning scenario based on which he/she asks questions to his/her high school’s college counselor. The point of the “mastery” part is to have a user practice what he/she learned from the previous steps. This step was designed to accomplish the Askplorer’s purpose; a user will be able to use the knowledge in a real setting rather than just knowing the questioning strategies as factual information. Askplorer scaffolds the scenario making activity by providing an interactive form. For example, a user is supposed to enter what he/she wants to ask about. Then Askplorer asks the user “what specifically do you want to know about that?” So, a user is prompted to narrow down his/her focus to ask more specific questions.
The “mastery” step is also an assessment. Because it is difficult for computer software to deal with the open endedness of human communication, I decided to have people evaluate a user’s mastery of the questioning strategies. After an interview with a high school college counselor, the user will ask for the counselor’s advice about how he/she can improve his/her questioning skills.

Key Featuers and Learning Theories