Abstract:

Quality assessment of teaching-learning processes in tertiary education represents a vector for both the design and adoption of a Learning Management System (LMS), where the quality of use defines the user satisfaction when interacting with the product functionalities, in a controlled environment. An extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been applied to assess the students' Quality of Experience (QoE) when designing a teaching-learning environment through collaborative tools, for a representative Higher Engineering Institution in Romania. A questionnaire (n=57) has been proposed, integrating the heuristic Nielsen usability factors into the TAM model. Responses have been collected from 460 students enrolled in the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in the fields of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, divided into 3 groups, according to levels of study (entry-level/ finishing year undergraduates and master's students). The aim of this experimental case study was to investigate and validate the applicability of the proposed model for institutional technology adoption from a perspective of Attitude and Behavioural Intention and to further identify its theoretical correlation with the process of requirements elicitiation in future LMSs design. Such augmentation is to strengthen the contribution of the System Usability Scale (SUS) to a more reliable assessment of subjective user perception, where a holistic evaluation is to address besides the student role, the roles of teachers, staff and experts.

Keywords:

Higher engineering education, usability, user acceptance testing (UAT), quality assessment.