Towards an ontology-based system to improve usability in collaborative learning environments

  • Authors:

  • Endhe Elias;Dalgoberto Miquilino;Ig Ibert Bittencourt;Thyago Tenório;Rafael Ferreira;Alan Silva;Seiji Isotani;Patrícia Jaques

  • Affiliations:

  • Center of Excellence in Social Technologies, The Computing Institute, Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Brazil;Center of Excellence in Social Technologies, The Computing Institute, Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Brazil,Maurício de Nassau Faculty, Brazil;Center of Excellence in Social Technologies, The Computing Institute, Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Brazil;Center of Excellence in Social Technologies, The Computing Institute, Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Brazil;Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil;Center of Excellence in Social Technologies, The Computing Institute, Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Brazil;University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil;PIPCA, University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), Brazil

  • Venue:
  • ITS'12 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The systems usability has been the subject of increasing discussion for several decades and when this concerns to computer support collaborative learning (CSCL) environment, it becomes a harder task. In CSCL environments, the usability is evaluated based on the the technical and pedagogical aspects. Therefore, the literature discusses different methods and techniques to validate usability in such environments. However, these methods usually need to be applied manually. The manual process use to be very expensive, very specific and time consuming. In addition, in CSCL environments, the usability validation becomes even more difficult due the existence of several usability requirements and its high level of interaction. For this reason, there is a need to automate the process. On the one hand, the technical usability can be automated after a formal description of the environment features. On the other hand, the pedagogical usability is dependent on the user experience and it is not possible to be totally automated. This paper presents a semi-automatic validation system to improve usability in CSCL environments. It uses ontology to represent the usability knowledge and software agents to automate the process. Finally, a case study in a real environment is described to present the advantages of using the proposed system.