Abstract:

Commonly defined as ‘ease of use’ usability is integral to the user experience. In the context of higher education, students’ experience of online learning materials influences the student experience of a course, and cumulatively will influence the students’ overall experience of program and even of the institution. Most university students use online learning materials. Providing a positive student experience is important to learning outcomes and institutional competitiveness. Usability in online learning is imperative.

University students usually access learning resources via courses held within a Learning Management System (LMS). The usability of the learning materials is the resultant of the usability of the LMS shell and the usability of learning resources themselves. Commonly, it is the course instructors who develop, structure and upload the learning resources (lecture content, assessment etc) to the LMS course site. The role of the course instructor (whether they are aware of it or not) extends beyond instructional designer to that of a user interface and interaction designer

There is considerable discussion around the usability of LMS and some around e-learning or online learning materials themselves (for example (Alturki, Aldraiweesh, & Kinshuck, 2016). The usability of instructor loaded resources within an LMS, under-explored (Eltahir et. al., 2019) . The authors find that much of the literature around learning and teaching resources relates to underpinning discipline content and requirements, and instructional strategies but not to usability. Usability and interface design are under-emphasized in instructional design and particularly in the case of instructor loaded resources in an LMS. Hence, the overarching goal of the present paper is to bring to greater attention usability and interface design, and its importance to online instructional materials.

As observed by Don Norman (1983) usability of an interactive systems results when the designers’ mental model (understanding of how something functions) matches the mental model of the user. Mental models determine the manner of use of the interactive system.

It is therefore useful to know:
- What are the mental models of the instructors about how students organise and make use of the LMS course site and its constituent learning materials?
- What are the students’ mental models of how what the LMS course site enables them/should enable them to do?

The authors report on a small preliminary investigation to reveal aspects of both instructor and student mental models related to instructor loaded content in the LMS. The insights gained from semi-structured interviews with students and instructors give support to the claim that there are differences in student and instructor mental models which have the potential to impact on student satisfaction with course sites. It is recommended that insights such as those gained in the reported investigation need to be disseminated to instructors as a starting point for informing the design and increasing usability of the learning resources which they load into LMS course sites.

Keywords:

LMS, higher education, usability, mental models, learning and teaching, instructor loaded resources, student experience.