Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemDelineating usable interface characteristics of an online teaching and learning platform( 2004)Teachers are under enormous pressure to integrate learning technologies into the curriculum. Consequently, schools are turning to commercial providers as `off-the-shelf products require very little or no customisation and can be swiftly implemented. One such product, myclasses, offers an online delivery platform that can potentially meet schools' move towards incorporating technology across the entire curriculum. This study focuses on an Australian school that purchased the myclasses course management software and looks at the way the potential users (teachers) of the program interact with the software's interface. Specifically, the key question of this study is: Which elements or characteristics of an education-based software's interface are usable by educators? Several teachers participated in this study as `test users' to elicit rich data on human interaction with the program, which was subsequently analysed to determine which characteristics were usable by teachers. This was triangulated with a usability inspection method known as heuristic evaluation, which is widely used by human computer interaction (HCI) and usability experts. The findings indicate that most of the interface's characteristics were not usable by teachers; however, the relatively few usable characteristics that were delineated are important for practitioners and developers of education-based software, and specifically course management programs such as myclasses Further implications that emerged as a result of this study concern the ongoing challenge faced by educational institutions that have implemented course management systems under the misguided assumption that supplying staff and students with online content management software will automatically boost the innovation of educational programs