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Educator's Voice

Volume 3, Issue 6
June 19, 2002

Students as Learners and Users: Enhancing Usability for Your Online Course

Participants have enrolled in an eLearning course to gain or enhance their knowledge and skills, not merely to play, or struggle, in an online environment. In the eLearning environment, participants become both learners and users. Participants as learners focus on learning new knowledge and acquiring new skills while pursuing a course's learning objectives. Participants as users access a course through an educational site; navigate through a variety of screens to gather information or enter into discussions with other participants, probably interact with other websites; and often engage in self-assessment activities as well as in more formal evaluation exercises. We see, then, in this context, thorough evaluation of successful online courses clearly indicates that success requires addressing participants as both learners and users.

So, how do you design eLearning courses that not only have rich, robust content, but that also receive positive participant reviews for great usability? One eLearning specialist, Jodi Bollaert, notes that highly usable eLearning materials are a result of combining sound instructional design with equally sound, usable technological courseware design. Course design techniques must be appropriate to the learner/user and support content delivery and the instructional objectives. In the same vein, internationally known usability expert Jakob Nielsen's comments on Web design can be applied to the eLearning context. That is, a usable eLearning course helps learners achieve their educational objectives in the simplest, most user-friendly way possible. In brief, learners want to easily access and navigate smoothly through a course site as they learn within their own context of choosing where and when they use the online course.

A key point is that poor usability should never be an impediment to learning. In the ideal eLearning environment, the courseware should be efficient, satisfying, transparent to the user, and fun to use. That's the goal to work toward. Based on the work of many experts in the field, there are a series of recommendations that can be profitably followed in designing and presenting eLearning courses:

• Orientation. Require new learners to take a pre-course student tutorial to familiarize themselves with hardware and software requirements, the eLearning site requirements, and courseware navigation. In the course syllabus and opening announcements, direct learners to exit the course and take the tutorial if they have not already done so. Assessments show that completion of such tutorials increases learner satisfaction with their eLearning experience while reducing the burden on instructors to answer technical or course navigation questions.
  
  
• Obvious visibility. Course elements, objects and controls, like those that aid learners' navigation, should be visible, obvious and, ideally, intuitive. That accomplished, it's in the instructor's interest to provide clear instructions to learners, in multiple places in the course, for using the elements and controls or recognizing objects. Such instructions, though they may seem redundant, help ensure course usability for learners.
  
  
• Simplicity. Keep the number of actions and objects to the minimum necessary for good functionality and the optimum delivery of your course material. Remember, just because you can add a lot of "bells and whistles" doesn't mean you should do so. In fact "too much or too many" may actually be a distraction to learners. That is, course usability is often reduced when a designer goes for too much "glitz."
  
  
• Help support. Learners should be in control of seeking needed help. That said, the course syllabus and/or opening announcements should clearly state how learners could seek help, both within the course and by going to the site Help Desk. Just because this material was covered in an orientation tutorial doesn't mean learners will remember it. Well-placed announcements and instructions to learners will always help reduce the burden on the instructor to answer similar questions from multiple learners.
  
  
• Accessibility. A key to good instructional design is to "chunk" material into usable sections that can be accessed easily and completed readily. It's always an important point to remember that this advice applies to the number of units in a course and the number of content items in each unit as well as the more common application of "chunking" to the actual course content.
  
  
• Balance in visual design. "Balance" is the key term here, and the design goal should align with the Goldilocks target of "just right."
  
  
  
  • Font. Experiment with font size and bolding to achieve desired legibility for different content items or screens. And, no, you don't have to use the same font size for all text on a page. In fact, assessment indicates increased learner satisfaction when there is some text differentiation on a page.
    
    
  • Color. A small amount of color text enhances usability while a riot of colored text will detract. Consider a color for headings on home and unit home pages. The same color can be used for sub-headings for content and instructions. The use of a second color could enhance usability, when combined with bolding, to emphasize key words, terms, etc. A note of caution here: don't use a blue color text that learners might confuse with the blue color associated with hyperlink text. Again, learner feedback indicates increased satisfaction when there is some use of relevant color text on a page.
    
    
  • Icons and graphics. The insertion of graphics is pedagogically sound when they relate directly to content or instructions. For example, use a common icon or graphic throughout a course's units whenever you present repeated material such as readings, assignments, lectures, discussions, etc. Animated items can enhance visual satisfaction as long as their placement has a reason and doesn't detract from the ultimate goal of learning.
  
  
  
• Interactivity. There is a strong correlation in course assessments between learner satisfaction and interactivity - interactivity across the board. The design goal is interactivity between learners, learners and the instructor, learners and the course tools and content, and learners and outside-the-course websites. More than color, graphics, animation, or anything high-tech in a course, designed-in interactivity is a sure bet to increase usability and learner satisfaction.
  
  
• Instructor feedback. In assessments, many students report that a "good" eLearning course provides them with quantitatively more, qualitatively better, timely instructor feedback than they commonly receive in traditional classroom settings. Effective, highly rated instructors are those who participate in discussions, provide feedback on assignments and assessments, and are accessible through email or office-hour chat rooms or discussion sites.

So, how can we sum it all up? Good design makes learning relatively easy and ensures that a course site is highly usable. Good instructional and technological design lets learners feel involved and in control as they navigate the eLearning environment.

       - Kenneth Switzer, Ph.D.

Sources

Bollaert, J. (January 2002). 10 tips for designing usable eLearning. Compuware Corporation E-Usability News. Retrieved April 3, 2001 (no longer available) from the World Wide Web:
http://www.compuware.com/intelligence/articles/e-usability_i2a_v1.htm
Article is no longer available online at this site.

Nielsen, J. (2000, December 15). Keep your users in mind. Internet World. Retrieved April 3, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0DXS/24_6/68155735/print.jhtml

TIP

Simple Steps Towards Good Course Design: "The Horizontal Rule"

When we talk about good Web layout, and student usability of courses, one of the main factors is the readability of the textual content that they are expected to learn and/or interact with. Any number of factors can hinder this usability - which include, but are certainly not limited to, images that, rather than enhancing the learning, become distractions with movement or irrelevance to the topic at hand; difficult to read fonts. Likewise, serif-style fonts are generally more difficult to read on a computer screen than their sans-serif cousins, as well as too much text filling up the field of vision.

For the purposes of this little snippet, we will concentrate on the latter of the examples given above: "too much text filling up the field of vision." A good majority of online courses today are, for the most part, text-based; and a good majority of that majority present a large number of Content Items as a stream of words all piled on top of each other - which also ask readers to do some amount of scrolling. Although it's difficult to avoid providing large amounts of information to truly replicate the lecturing that we do in the classroom, there are some simple techniques that can make the reading of this text a bit easier on the eyes (not to mention the attention span).

One basic, but effective, way of breaking up pages and pages of text into those proverbial "small, digestible chunks" is by using the Horizontal Rule. The horizontal rule is basically a piece of HTML code <HR> that adds a horizontal line across the entire page, with a bit of space before and after it - which can be added to any "Text"-type content item in the HTML mode of the visual editor. The line nicely serves the purpose of breaking up paragraphs, or adding a good spacer after page titles or important information. There are numerous variables as to how you can set up your Rules, as follows:

hr_rules.html

       -- Peter Cassidy, MA