Usability Testing for E-Learning

An excellent discussion of Usability in E-Learning ...

"Culturally diverse and geographically far-flung, the new global workforce is leading businesses to search for better, more effective ways to manage growing requirements for employee learning solutions. Clearly, e-learning has become one of the most popular solutions to meet this need. While e-learning enthusiasts extol its lower costs, broader accessibility and personalization potential, e-learning also has experienced slow user adoption and high dropout rates in many organizations. In some cases, users become easily frustrated or unenthusiastic about the material, and if they don’t complete the course, the company might not realize a return on its investment. Usability testing can address some of these shortfalls in the learner experience, as well as provide designers with a set of principles and methods that can be used to design courses that will capture and hold users’ interest from start to finish.

Usability testing has long been a part of the software and product design world. Jakob Nielsen brought the concept of usability to the Web, making Web pages simple to navigate and intuitively organized so that users can easily find the information they're looking for. While this definition may be considered sufficient in the world of software, the definition of usability in the e-learning world should encompass a few more components than simply good user interface design."   continued ...   (Via CLO)

Achieving Usability in e-learning.