Abstract:

The innovative and creative use of technologies in learning and education is dramatically influencing teaching and learning paradigms and learner’s experiences by replacing traditional learning in many countries. ICT enhanced learning, open educational resources and the associated digital technologies, applications and contents are rapidly evolving, which in turn continuously changes and affecting the benefits, effectiveness, and impact on learning outcomes. The impact of online learning platform needs to be assessed regularly to ensure its usability and usefulness through solving possible errors and suggest improvement. However, because of the novelty and diversity of ICT tools and emerging digital technologies in the educational context and the complexity of factors affecting their outcomes, measuring the impact is a challenge task. Impact assessment has always shown great potential for improving ICT based systems and tailoring it toward users’ requirements, satisfaction and stakeholders’ expectations. Despite of the importance of this field, still there is a lack of research on the measurement of the impact of the learning platforms themselves or their efficiency and effectiveness. This research investigates the methodology to develop a framework for measuring impact of an eLearning platform. The framework proposed in this paper is developed for measuring the impact of an Open eLearning and Innovation platform, known as Open Discovery Space (ODS), which aims to provide open contents, technologies, services, scenarios, lesson plans, and tools for the teachers and schools communities across the Europe particularly and globally at large. The developed impact evaluation framework proposing in this paper provides the methodological steps for measuring the impact on areas such as regional curricula; schools; educational systems; the use and usability platform; teaching and learning outcomes.

Keywords:

Impact assessment, e-learning portal, ODS, Evaluation Framework.