Paola Plantamura

Towards Guidelines for Usability of e-Learning Applications

One present goal of researchers and developers is to design software tools that make learning materials available online in an educationally effective manner. We face the twofold challenge of implementing advanced e-learning functionalities, though designing their interface so as to provide an easy interaction grasping the students’ interest. A poorly designed interface makes students spend more time in learning it than in mastering the provided knowledge, so becoming a barrier to effective learning. In this context, both User-Centered Design (UCD) and Learner-Centered Design (LCD) guidelines are needed; it is also important to devise suited evaluation tools, able to help in identifying usability, and, more in general, accessibility flaws. Such tools must be designed bearing in mind the specific characteristics of e-learning applications. Traditional heuristic evaluation appears too general and subjective. In this paper, we propose a set of guidelines and criteria for e-learning platforms (containers) and for educational modules (contents), to be used within the SUE (Systematic Usability Evaluation) inspection. We point out that human factors experts can primarily evaluate “syntactic” aspects of applications. Experts of education science and domain experts are to be involved for a more comprehensive evaluation.

Can a CSCL environment promote effective interaction

The use of technology to support collaborative tasks and learning is at present one of the central themes of research into computer education. Recent experiences have demonstrated that computer-mediated peer interaction is in some contexts more effective than face-to-face communication. The present work aims to make a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the peer-to-peer communication fostered by the use of a Web-based environment to support cooperative learning of geometry. In line with other experiences conducted internationally, our results confirm that the use of technological support to stimulate communication has positive effects not only on the quality of the interaction but also on the quality of the learning gain of the individual members making up the cooperative community.

A WWW-based cooperative learning system and its effects on students' achievement

Today, there is growing interest in the use of Internet and WWW to achieve cooperative type activities and in particular, cooperative learning, based on the principles of constructivism. Cooperation can undoubtedly enhance network-mediated instructional systems but efficacious cooperative learning can be ensured providing these systems with components that reproduce well-established pedagogical models of cooperative learning, together with components that can assess both individual and group progress. This is made possible by introducing AI techniques in computer-aided learning systems that allow pedagogical strategies to be embedded. In this work, the authors present a system on the WWW for cooperative learning about geometric figures, where each student communicates with the rest of the group online, and a study to evaluate the cooperative learning effectiveness of our project called Geometriamo. The system is based on Slavins Student Team Learning model for cooperative learning.

HyperValu@tor, a tool for the multidisciplinary assessment of didactic hypermedia

The rapid spread of hypermedia has led to a proliferation of didactic software available on the market, but it is getting more and more diffi cult to choose the right product. To meet the teacher’s need to acquire methodologies and tools supporting her/his new function of critical evaluator of didactic SW, we have created HyperValu@tor, a tool for the multidisciplinary assessment of didactic hypermedia. HyperValu@tor takes into account the main quality indicators guaranteeing overall teaching effi cacy (content, multimediality, interactivity, navigability, style). Using the questionnaire supplied, the teacher/evaluator assigns a score (from 0 to 2) to a series of questions probing these quality indicators. All the indicators need to be considered in order to achieve an overall assessment, but if only some aspects of a hypermedia need to be judged, the single indicators can be assessed separately with HyperValu@tor. This dynamic navigation, offering the possibility to choose which indicators to evaluate, is one of the strong points of HyperValu@tor. But its most salient feature is that it allows teachers/evaluators to set up collaborative activities through the Web. Unlike other tools in the fi eld, with HyperValu@tor it is possible to make a public evaluation, whereby several users can collaborate to achieve an assessment of the same product.

A Non-invasive Cooperative Student Model

A crucial issue in building a user-centered Intelligent Educational System is that of building and maintaining user models to enable the system to tailor its behavior to the needs of the given individual. Various student modeling techniques are described in the literature (overlay, perturbation, differential), that represent the students knowledge in different ways. A common problem affecting these techniques is how to obtain the data needed to build the student model. Open models are one of the possible solutions but these have some drawbacks. In the present article we propose a new open model aiming to solve some of these, by minimizing the invasiveness of the requirement for student involvement in the self-assessment process, together with the sense of frustration such a requirement can arouse in students who are unable to assess themselves and are therefore ignored by the system.