Evaluation

Abstract

This section describes the evaluation and use cases that assessed different aspects of Paigos. The first section covers technical evaluations and investigates the claims made in the previous chapters, i.e. whether the oio can be mapped to third-party metadata (Section 7.1.1); whether the mediator can access third-party repositories (Section 7.1.2); and whether the Web-service interface of Paigos is usable by third-parties (Section 7.1.3). Furthermore, I describe the results of a detailed analysis of the performance of Paigos (Section 7.1.4). The analysis shows that Paigos generates courses that take a student approximately 11 hours to study in less than half a second, as long as other components such as the learner model and the repositories are able to answer requests in a timely manner. For real life usage results involving the target audience, i.e. learners are equally important as technical results. Therefore, Paigos was subject to formative and summative evaluations (Section 7.2). The evaluation involved about fifty students from Germany, UK, and Spain. The final summative evaluation illustrates that students like to use Paigos and appreciate the interactive possibilities offered by Paigos.