Abstract
The importance of groupware tools in e-learning practice is increasing, because of their educational relevance and of the importance of group abilities in today’s job activities. The paper addresses some critical issues of asynchronous collaborative tools hosted in Web-learning platforms. A model to capture user quality perceptions for these tools is presented, and an investigation conducted in three case studies where e-learning platforms were used to share and comment on written works is reported in detail. Quantitative and qualitative data are used in a complementary way to capture the complexity of educational collaborative activities. The impact of technologies on work organization, writing and peer-feedback activities is discussed. Users dedicated more time to feedback activities than they would have in real-life contexts, and paid more attention to the style and content of their writing. Communication was more focused and honest than in real life (even though more distant and at the risk of misunderstanding), and its indirectness encouraged shy and impaired people. Usability problems emerged from platform design, educators’ choices and server-side settings; Web-based systems seem to pose specific usability issues when users are required a strong active role; compatibility issues highlight the need for a closer Web standard compliance.
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Notes
The study was performed in the context of the European Scribani project (http://www.scribani.org), whose main goal was the creation of a common writing platform; an online didactical toolset aimed at reinforcing and complementing traditional classroom techniques.
In order to test the reliability of the model and methodology proposed, the questionnaire was also administrated to an additional set of students with characteristics similar to those of students of Case C (a new class of students of the same course). We will refer to this additional test case (not considered in the results of this paper) as Case C2. Context of adoption, students characteristics, teaching/learning methodologies and course contents of Case C and C2 were almost identical. Scores obtained in the two cases were very similar as well. We think this accounts for the reliability and robustness of the model, and suggests that results are reproducible in similar contexts. For the sake of simplicity, however, the following discussion will not consider the data set of Case C2.
However, Open Source supporters could argue that the best usability and functionality results were obtained by an OS project (Moodle), and suggest that an OS design/development process is more suitable when trying to face the problems reported below. This could be due to the fact that large communities of motivated users and developers are involved in public debates about existing problems and solutions, allowing to better point out and fix usability, accessibility and compatibility problems (Raymond 2001).
In typical three-tier architecture Web systems, a Web server receives requests from the client browsers and generates (x)html pages using data provided by a database.
As reported in quoted texts above, several users complained about the worsening of some features in the upgrade release of a platform. “So why did one have to make the system deteriorate this way, from the old to the current version of the platform??? Can’t there technicians find any other more useful work, than destroying good features that they’ve built up???”.
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Davoli, P., Monari, M. & Severinson Eklundh, K. Peer activities on Web-learning platforms—Impact on collaborative writing and usability issues. Educ Inf Technol 14, 229–254 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-008-9080-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-008-9080-x