Literature Review

Usability issues of e-learning systems: casestudy for moodle learning management system
summited by: Eskinder, Habtamu, and Abdu Summited to: Temtim Assefa HILCOE School of computer science

Introduction
Education is an organized process that transfers knowledge, skills, values and beliefs for the betterment of social life E-learning is an approach to facilitate and enhance learning through both computer and communications technology Mobile devices have potential to be integrated into the classroom, because they contain unique characteristics such as: portability, social interactivity, context sensitivity, connectivity and individuality. Adoption of LMS by students is still on the low rate, mostly because of poor usability of existing eLearning systems. Usability issue is rising to the higher level on mobile platform, due to device limitations and also because of context of use.

Hypothesis
o Moodle LMS has usability issues, which represent major disadvantages of this LMS and makes eLearning systems less effective o Usability issues are arising to the higher level on mobile platform; It is wrong to take a mobile device as a surrogate for desktop or laptop PC.2

Background Literature
Although there were many researches targeting Moodle, quite a few were conducted on the usability of Moodle via mobile devices there were several projects not specially targeting Moodle, but offering solutions for social interaction via mobile devise. Most researches suggestions on such problem were using eLearning system through Mobile browsers Most of the researches rely on adaptive technologies in providing access to eLearning systems e.g. Mobile browsers Drawbacks are:- Limited Screen Size, Limited Input method and Limited network bandwidth

Research
The research was carried by using design science method compared the approach to Moodle LMS via desktop computers and Mobile devices have developed a rich client application for pocket Pc and web service as standard middleware interface between Moodle database and a client application for comparing other researchers suggestion i.e. mobile browsers

Finally, the authors made a usability study on the new solutions (PDA with rich client application) against the available current practices (desktop with browser, PDA with browser and mobile phone with browser).

 12 subjects
8 male, 4 female undergraduate senior year students mean knowledge of CMS systems was 4.92 out of 7

Subjects were told to perform six (6) LMS task which are login, read News, send & receive messages, read archives and check grades on the four devices two cameras were following actions on the students face and mobile devices

Results
Subjects were instructed to perform five LMS tasks

Login, Read News, Send Messages, Receive Messages, Read Archives and check grades
Usability study was associated with five attributes:

Efficiency, Learnability, Memorability, Encountering errors and User satisfaction.

Efficiency
Click number to complete a given task Desktop 6.83 PDA with rich application 9.33 (lower click # with four of the tasks) PDA with browser 10.83 Mobile phone with browser 15.67 Amount of data transfer for a given task Desktop 38.5 kb PDA with rich application 1.83 kb This was because, the application returns only the relevant data PDA with browser 14.33 kb Mobile phone with browser 14.33 kb

Average user time for a single task Desktop 57.23 sec PDA with rich application 40.7 sec PDA with browser 91.37 sec Mobile phone with browser 102 sec Encountering Errors
Catastrophic errors: No catastrophic error was noticed on all the four devices Simple errors: Two simple errors were happened with mobile phone device

User satisfaction Measured through questioners Subjective questions were selected for checking user satisfaction Interface is complete, Interface is simple to use, System is fast for use, system is cooperative in completing the tasks 9 subjects chose PDA with rich application as their first preference Second preferred devices was desktop approach Third and Fourth preferred devices are PDA and Mobile phone with browser respectively.

Conclusions
From the findings on the usability study and User comments Subjects experienced some difficulty to perform easier tasks on desktop
Conclusion 1:

Moodle wasnt user friendly o proved the first hypothesis Moodle through mobile devices (PDA and mobile phones) with browser gave lower results than the desktop approach
Conclusion 2:

Usability wasnt improved by Integrating Moodle with

mobile devices
o Proved the second hypothesis
Final Conclusion:

The best solution for improving usability of Moodle eLearning management system was to use: the new prototype i.e. PDA with Rich Client Application

Assumption Poor usability of existing eLearning systems Leads to poor acceptance. Mobile device is not a substitute for desktop or laptop PC. Existing research in this field. Researches rely on adaptive technologies in providing access to eLearning Systems Few drawbacks: Limited screen size: Limited input methods Limited network bandwidth Developed a prototype Rich client application for PocketPC, A Web service as interface between Moodle database and a client application. Usability study as well as results are presented and discussed Comparison of HTML and rich client Moodle access screen size: Better component layout input methods: gives more options for user (faster) network bandwidth: small network overhead Click or Tap numbers/ Measured data transfer (Kb) Desktop ,PDA Application ,PDA Browser ,Mobile Browser Average user time per operation (second), for each of devices Desktop ,PDA Application ,PDA Browser and Mobile Browser

Limitation
Sample student selected for the usability study is relatively low

New application can only work on PDAs and smart

phones Usability studystudied only one attribute . Learnability Few resources was used for testing They only took experienced user as a sample.

Further
Usability study of this application in a real life situation. Implementation of the same application for other Moodle modules like blog, wikis and others were considered. Further study on the new application to support any mobile that capable internet access and application enabled.

Thank you!