Generating an Educational Domain Checklist through an Adaptive Framework for Evaluating Educational Systems

The growth of the Internet and related technologies has enabled the development of a new breed of dynamic websites that is growing rapidly in use and that has had a huge impact on many businesses. One type of websites that have been widely spread and are being widely adopted is the educational websites. There are many forms of educational websites, such as free online websites and Web-based server software. This creates challenges regarding their continuing evaluation and monitoring in order to measure their efficiency and effectiveness, to assess user satisfaction and, ultimately, to improve their quality. The lack of an adaptive usability checklist for improvement of the usability assessment process for educational systems represents a missing piece in ‘usability testing’. This paper presents an adaptive Domain-Specific Inspection (DSI) checklist as a tool for evaluating the usability of educational systems. The results show that the adaptive educational usability checklist helped evaluators to facilitate the evaluation process. It also provides an opportunity for website owners to choose the usability area(s) that they think need to be evaluated. Moreover, this method was more efficient and effective than user testing (UT) and heuristics evaluation (HE) methods. Keywords—Heuristic evaluation (HE);User Testing (UT);Domain Specific Inspection (DSI); Adaptive Framework; Adaptive Checklist