Evaluation of Web-based Course Management Software from Faculty and Student User-Centered Perspectives

摘要

Course management software enables faculty members to learn one software package for web-based curriculum, assessment, synchronous and asynchronous discussions, collaborative work, multimedia and interactive resource development. There are as many as 109 different course management software packages on the market and several studies have evaluated and compared various aspects of these tools. However, these studies generally focused on checklists of what these products can do, not what these products need to do, or can do well. In addition, there is little data to suggest that the pages created by these software packages were easy to use by the students, or that the use of these tools by faculty increased the quality of instruction experienced by the students. Faculty and students have very different requirements for this one product, faculty need to be able to develop resources quickly and efficiently using this software, while students need to be able to find and access the course materials their instructor has assigned. Therefore, these analyses may be of limited predictive power in determining the applicability of different course management software for deployment by educational institutions. The objective of this study was to evaluate the usability and usefulness of course management software to support traditional classroom instruction from both the faculty and student perspective. This study was done in two parts, the first part asked participants with no experience using course management software to evaluate several packages and choose the one they preferred, and the second part was a follow-up analysis after both faculty and students had used the software for an entire semester.