EVALUATION OF VIRTUAL LEARNING PLATFORMS: THE CASE OF POLIFORMAT

Performance evaluation of virtual learning platforms is essential for improvement and management of these systems. High education institutions rely on online learning platforms increasingly, creating new opportunities in virtual education and transforming even the traditional learning, combining in-class with on line teaching. The complexity of a learning platform and the combination of factors that the end user perceives in a learning system make that a purely technical evaluation is limited and partial. This paper proposes a scale based on the Bostock’s (1998) checklist for the software application assessment of interface design features, interactivity and technical requirements. This scale has been considered and applied to the e-learning platforms, and afterwards evaluated in a real virtual training environment, the PoliformaT platform of the Universitat Politècnica de Valéncia, a system based on the Sakai environment. The results obtained are analyzed in order to assess the goodness and convergence of the items in each dimension of the scale. This generic scale for software applications has shown good results for learning platforms. The measured dimensions of both interface design and interactivity can be especially useful for system designers.