Aug 25 - Karevaara, From educational usability to context-specific teachability...

Katja Karevaara, Media Education Centre, University of Helsinki.
From educational usability to context-specific teachability: Development and use of the network-based teaching material contents in higher engineering education.

Central concept and target for the research is "teachability". Also "content teachability"
will be used as a synonym. The reason why the concept "teachability" is chosen for this research is that often the term "pedagogical usability" (e.g. Melis et al. 2003) is still rather connected to the term "usability".

Pedagogical usability is often focusing on the aspects whether the interface, tools, content, and the tasks of the e-learning environments support learning in various contexts according to certain pedagogical objectives (Silius et al. 2003, Tervakari et al. 2002).

"Studiability" of the materials is close to the pedagogical usability.

The term "usability" has a stable status in engineering sciences in analysing the use of the technical interface of a software application (e.g. Nielsen 2000), which viewpoint is not central in this research.
In this research teachability is a sub-concept for "adaptability" introduced by Ruokamo et al. (2005). According to them, adaptability can be seen as a general approach for improving the usability of network-based teaching materials. Adaptability could be called as pedagogical usability. However, their approach for the usability is deeper connected to the pedagogical issues as they argue that it is not confined to the enhancement of user interfaces but rather is a means of facilitating the teaching-studying-learning –process. (Ruokamo et al. 2005) Figure 1. will present the relationships of pedagogical usability in this study. In the figure the viewpoints for adaptability are based on the arguments by Tella et al. (2004) and Ruokamo et al. (2005).
Teachability in this reserach means the efficiency of the subject matters. It can be also described as teachers' creative and relevant use of the network-based teaching material contents. Concept is related to the flexi-mode approach where the use of the contents is analysed in the didactical framework of the whole course. However, eventually teachers will internally validitate the concept teachability.

Research in pedagogical usability has been active recently. For example Kukulska-Hulme et al. (2004) conducted a project during 2001-2003 in Open University (UK). During the project it was recognised that "to get to the heart of pedagogical usability, we have to understand more about the impact of reguirements in relation to communities, contexts and disciplines." The research group found therefore several layers of usability: contextspecific, academic, general and technical. In detail:
• Context specific usability relates to the requirements of particular disciplines and courses.
• Academic usability deals with educational issues, such as pedagogical strategy.
• General usability issues are common to most websites and include aspects such as clear navigation and accessibility for users with special needs.
• Technical usability addresses issues such as broken links and server reliability.

My comments: He was a PhD student at the time of writing as he talked about his Doctoral dissertation.

References that I may want to read further in future:

Kukulska-Hulme, A. & Shields, L. (2004). The keys to usability in e-learning websites. Networked learning conference. Lancaster.

Melis, E., Weber, M. & Andrès, E. (2003). Lessons for (Pedagogic) Usability of eLearning Systems. World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher education. 2003(1), 281-284.

Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability: the practice of simplicity. Indianapolis: New riders publishing.