EFL Learners' Usability Evaluation of an Educational Website

Abstract

This chapter aims to depict the perception of usability of an educational website among EFL students. Forty-two medical science students of two general English courses at Tehran University participated in the study. For one semester the students used the educational website designed to support in-class instruction to learn English as a foreign language. At the end of the course students were given a usability evaluation questionnaire to evaluate the usability of the website with respect to: content, navigation, user interface design, performance and effectiveness, general instructional objectives, the website parts, and language related objectives. Conclusively, students were roughly satisfied with the usability of the website. Further, user interface design of the website was considered to be usable while the performance and effectiveness of the website were not perceived to be very useable. Comparison of female and male participants showed that in general female students were more satisfied with the usability of the website, specifically with the user interface design of the website.