Developing An Ergonomic And Student-Oriented Moodle E-Learning Environment

GOLA, ELISABETTA;V. Favrin

2011-01-01

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Abstract

This paper discusses the design and delivery of an ergonomic, interactive, user-oriented e-learning environment in the online graduate program in Communication Studies of the University of Cagliari (Italy). The design of the learning environment was based upon a learning community project, in which a community of teachers cooperated to lead a class of about 30 students, which had to analyze the Moodle environment under use (originally customized by a software company in charge of this task in the Unisofia European project) and define the guidelines to improve it from the point of view of the usability, user-friendliness and ergonomics. Students were expected to take responsibility for their own analysis as well as their colleagues1. The project required a shift in control: teachers were leading the project, but had to accept critiques and objection to their view about the structure of the web pages of their courses. Students, who worked in teams, took the lead in identifying problems, solutions, and propose new implementations. To be able to do that, they had to play the role of Moodle teachers in a platform that was similar to the original one and that was completely under their control. The result of this experience was that the needs and ideas of students about the environment were very different when looking at the details, but they were responding to some common directions. So, even if the web pages implemented by the students were very different from each other, the final guidelines allowed the design team (teachers and technical staff) to further customize the Moodle environment under usage. This same environment is still adopted by the Communication Studies online program.