Abstract:

Web portholes, university entry pages and home pages can all serve as gateways to learning management systems (LMSs) that house the activities and resources that learners need to utilize. In order to gain more insight into the complex interaction of user, links and relative probability of selection of a link; the form and function of the links need to be studied in detail. One criticism of LMSs is the difficulty in finding particular learning resources and activities the learners want. The aim of this study is to provide a statistical comparison of the usability of online university language learning courses housed on different learning management systems, namely Moodle and Blackboard. Click-through rates and drop-off rates have been used as measures of link effectiveness at driving traffic to particular webpages. Those rates measure the percentage of users actually clicking through or dropping off. However, we chose to measure the usability of a learning website using Nielson`s concept of discount usability testing. This was done through a usability study in which a novice user was asked to carry out a number of tasks and the time taken to access particular sections of the website measured. The user followed a talk-aloud procedure and follow-up interviews were held. We also counted the number of available links, estimated the relative probability of selection of particular links taking into account the position, size, colour and prominence of the links at each level of the website from the starting page to the target page. By analyzing the data, we created a click-through probability formula to estimate the relative difficulty of a new user reaching the target page. The findings comparing the time taken by the user and the calculated probability will be shared and recommendations for further applications of our probability formula will be given.

Keywords:

Usability study, learning management system, VLE.