Evaluation of the Virtual Mobility Learning Hub

We live in a fast-paced world where the most valuable of all commodities is time. All of us dream of having enough time to live, work, learn and enjoy life. Higher Education is transformed by these aspirations, as in today’s society students are also working adults. Therefore, online courses especially under the form of MOOCs, virtual learning environments, offers them access to virtual learning and working. The OpenVMLH (Virtual Mobility Learning Hub) is an innovative multilingual environment which was created as part of the Open Virtual Mobility, a European-funded project, with the purpose to promote collaborative learning, social connectivism and networking as an instructional method, OERs as the main content and open digital credentials. This paper presents the analysis of the OpenVMLH. By harmonizing the qualitative and quantitative evaluation performed on 139 participants, using several usability testing methods in an extended period of time (8 months), we draw our conclusions on how a MOOC platform dedicated to virtual mobility should perform. Some of the issues are related to the usability of the OpenVMLH, others pertained to the actual creation and formatting of the learning materials but very few are of high severity. The improved version of the learning hub is now used by students and professors in 5 universities.

[1]  Diana Andone,et al.  Designing a Collaborative Learning Hub for Virtual Mobility Skills - Insights from the European Project Open Virtual Mobility , 2018, HCI.

[2]  Thomas Durand,et al.  Usability Testing of MOOC: Identifying User Interface Problems , 2019, ICEIS.

[3]  Mihai Onita,et al.  Usability Evaluation of a LMS Mobile Web Interface , 2012, ICIST.

[4]  Arif Ur Rahman,et al.  Evaluation of Navigational Aspects of Moodle , 2016 .

[5]  Sime Arsenovski,et al.  Evaluating usability in learning management system moodle , 2008, ITI 2008 - 30th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces.

[6]  Azizah Jaafar,et al.  Evaluation of User Interface Design for Leaning Management System (LMS): Investigating Student's Eye Tracking Pattern and Experiences , 2012 .

[7]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  Severity Ratings for Usability Problems , 2006 .

[8]  Christos Katsanos,et al.  Comparative usability evaluation of three popular MOOC platforms , 2016, 2016 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON).

[9]  Huseyin Dogan,et al.  Usability Evaluation of a Virtual Learning Environment : a University Case Study , 2018 .

[10]  Arturo Moquillaza,et al.  Guidelines to Evaluate the Usability and User Experience of Learning Support Platforms: A Systematic Review , 2019 .

[11]  Sara Johansson,et al.  An Adaptable Usability Checklist for MOOCs : A usability evaluation instrument for Massive Open Online Courses , 2014 .

[12]  Pedro Isaias,et al.  Usability and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) , 2022, Sustainable Design.