Conceptual design, development and evaluation of an interactive exercise software tool for household technology courses in tertiary education

E‐Learning is a concept which has been known for a number of years. It was firstly promoted enthusiastically and then quietly came to a halt when the unrealistic expectations set could not be fulfilled. However, it can be a very useful tool when used in the right context and in combination with traditional learning methods. This is demonstrated in this study, where an E‐Learning tool was designed as a universal exercise software tool, developed to support the learning and training phase of students in lectures on household technologies, and evaluated on a specific course at the University of Bonn. The tool itself – called ItkA – proves on the one hand to be well suited to encouraging students to do additional self‐study and on the other hand is simple enough to allow lecturers with little or no experience of E‐Learning tools to implement the specific knowledge of a lecture.