A Model for Usability Evaluation of Learning Management Systems

Abstract

Learning management systems (LMSs) are increasingly popular in education. The usability of these systems must be examined to ensure they meet the needs of both students and faculty. To address the limitations of existing models for evaluating the usability of LMS, this research proposes a new model that combines objective measures collected from eye-tracking with subjective measures collected from retrospective think-aloud protocols and questionnaires. This model evaluates the effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability of LMSs. The proposed model was applied to study the usability of the LMS used at King Saud University (Blackboard) and was compared with other existing usability evaluation models. The findings indicate that the proposed model fulfilled its intended purpose and provided more comprehensive results than existing models.