Athanasis Karoulis

The evaluation of ARCO: a lesson in curatorial competence and intuition with new technology

This article presents the results of the evaluation study of the Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects (ARCO) system which provides software and interface tools to museum curators for the development of virtual museum exhibitions for the World Wide Web or for information kiosks. The aim of the current research is to investigate how a virtual museum system is coping with the demands of museum curators, to examine the needs of virtual museum visitors, and to provide a set of criteria and guidelines for defining effective evaluation of such systems. Evaluation methods such as heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs were employed in the study in order to assess various components and interfaces of the system.

Combinatory Usability Evaluation of an Educational Virtual Museum Interface

This paper presents the usability evaluation study that has been undertaken for the augmented representation of cultural objects (ARCO) system. The main purpose of this system is to integrate an enhanced educative and entertaining experience to virtual museum visitors. The aim of the current research is the evaluation of the interface of the system. Users as well as domain experts were recruited to investigate the most effective combination of user-based and expert-based evaluation, in order to elicit the most valuable results. Quantitative as well as qualitative approaches have also been employed, thus providing a framework for a holistic evaluation of the usability of an interface of such kind

Experimentally Assessing a Resource-Effective Design for ODL Environments.

This study is concerned with the formal assessment of a Distance Learning Environment (DLE) created to deliver a course on UML sequence diagrams to university‐level students, divided into control and treatment groups. An ad‐hoc DLE was constructed to deliver instruction to the treatment group, while the control group was taught in a traditional face‐to‐face way. The main point of concern is whether a DLE can be as effective for the treatment group, as the faceto‐ face lecture is for the control group, in terms of gaining mastery on the domain. So, a controlled experiment was organized and executed, in order to measure the participants’ performance in both groups. The results have shown no statistically significant difference for both groups of students. So, it can be argued that in the context of this experiment and by following a DLE‐design close enough to the traditional face‐to‐face approach, one can obtain equally good results using distance learning as with the traditional system. However, a number of concerns remain and more work is needed to generalize the results of this work on other domains.

Formal Evaluation of an Instructional ODL Tool

This paper presents the application and evaluation by means of a controlled experiment of an instructional tool during an Open and Distance Learning (ODL) course. The core issue of investigation is whether this instructional aid can support, guide and scaffold the distant student in his/her study. For this purpose, a controlled experiment was conducted with the participation of 191 undergraduate students. Descriptive statistics as well as a variety of statistical methods have been applied to the collected data, in order to test the research hypotheses. The results have shown a statistical significant difference in performance for the student group that used the tool. Finally, concerns about the application of the tool in a broader context and further research on the area are also presented.

A Framework for the Design, Development and Evaluation of Multimedia Based Learning Environments: ”ISTOS: An Application in the Computer Networking Domain”

We experience nowadays a major shift in the way we understand the design and development of educational environments in our institutions. New technologies find their way into the traditional educational settings, although a multitude of problems has to be dealt with. In this paper authors comment first on the general aspects of multimedia technology and multimedia product delivery along with problems arising when integrating such products into educational environments. Moreover authors present an instructional framework based on Cognitive Flexibility Theory and Cognitive Apprentiship prescriptions in their attempt to address these problems and propose a solution.