Course management systems from a usability perspective

Abstract

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has revolutionised practices in business, government, health, and education amongst others. In education, the Internet and World Wide Web opened new doors for teaching and learning, thereby affording educators an opportunity to deploy new teaching, learning and administration strategies and affording learners a rich learning experience. In South African higher education institutions, course management systems (CMSs) have been adopted, and are becoming increasingly popular among academics. However, much attention has been focused on the technology, namely the functionalities and tools offered by CMSs. Very little effort has been directed at understanding the usability properties of this class of software and the impact it may have on adoption of this type of software. This paper focuses on the evaluation of selected CMSs used in higher education by using specific usability criteria and principles as the basis for the evaluation. This usability inspection method is termed heuristic evaluation, which is performed ‘as a systematic inspection of a user interface design for usability’ (Nielsen 2005). Results pertaining to the heuristic evaluation of the selected CMSs will be discussed. This paper is part of a larger study that aims at generating knowledge about the interactive properties of CMSs.