Evaluating E-learning Platforms for Schools: Use and Usability, User Acceptance, and Impact on Learning

Usability is widely acknowledged in the ICT-related literature as one of the most important factors that can directly affect the overall acceptance and success of any ICT application, tool, software, and platform. Ensuring usability is one of the main challenges of e-learning system developers. This paper describes two case studies designed to (i) evaluate the usability and (ii) assess the impact on school learning of the newly designed ODS Portal. The paper presents the development of the testing/evaluation methodology, the evaluation exercise, and the analysis of the results from an extensive "use and usability" evaluation of the Open Discovery Space educational online platform.