Usability Satisfaction of Open SourceeLearning Courseware Websites

摘要

Open source movement plays a vital role in the development of open source eLearning coursewares (OSeLCWs) in general and Open CourseWare (OCW) in particular. Nowadays, there are a number of top class institutions around the globe post their course materials openly and freely via the Web. This paper concerns with assessing end-user satisfaction (educators and stu-dents) of usability of websites in terms of usefulness of the content as well as the design aspects of websites such as visual pleasantness of screen design, ease of navigation, consistent page design, and website speed. The study covers the OSeLCW websites of MIT in USA, VTU in India and TITECH in Japan. The research findings revealed that, educators and students were more satisfied with the website design of MIT OCW, less satisfied with VTU OSeLCW, and least satisfied with TITECH OCW. Whereas the usefulness of the content, the results shows that, users were more satisfied with the course materials of VTU, followed by MIT OCW and TITECH OCW respectively.