Abstract:
Learning and communicating with students through electronic medium provides many benefits that cannot be achieved through conventional approaches. The use of a learning management system (LMS) is the most popular way of electronic resources. By this facility education is persisted without limitation of time and location. There are many learning management systems available, both commercial and open source. Existing studies showed that although there are many other reasons of high distraction from LMSs such as inappropriate use of contents and technology, but the key issue is poor usability of such platforms. Though, considerable efforts have been paid on usability characteristics of LMSs, such as efficiency, ease of use, learnability, attractiveness, operation-ability, memorability, errors, and satisfaction and many more. But very little attention has been focused on evaluating the usability of LMS in relation to navigation aspects and the impact these may have on usability.
This study, therefore, aims to develop a framework for evaluating the navigational structure of LMS. Different factors of evaluation framework are gathered through an extensive literature study. For the purpose of validating the framework, we applied it on Moodle - an open source LMS that has been increasingly achieving global popularity. Consequently, this study also aims to assess usability issues of Moodle associated with navigation. Results of this study offer suggestions for improving the navigation in Moodle so that users will feel more interested to participate in learning activities. Implications for Moodle navigation are derived based on both qualitative and quantitative data gathered through survey. The survey was conducted among students and teachers of two leading universities of Pakistan. Some of the problems we found in Moodle navigation structure are: inconsistency in placement of buttons, presence of back page button on some pages, visited and unvisited links are not distinguishable, some icons do not have supporting text, and no support for adaptive navigation. The efficiency of navigation in Moodle can be improved, if identified problems are fixed. Moreover, result of this study shows that ease of navigation increases navigation efficiency and it is also highly correlated with the factors of proposed framework.
