Enhancing user experience in e-learning systems: A new user-centric RESTful web services approach

The development of e-learning platforms often focuses on designing system requirements rather than users’ functional requirements, which negatively impacts user behavior, interaction, and the overall e-learning experience. This paper aims to bridge that gap by introducing a new approach to designing and developing e-learning systems based on user-centric design principles. Specifically, it proposes a user-centric web services architecture for e-learning systems. The approach involves designing RESTful web service APIs tailored to the specific functionalities required by various e-learning users, including learners, tutors, teachers, and administrators. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through a comprehensive overview of the implementation process of an e-learning prototype built using the Django REST framework. The e-learning system's user experience was rigorously evaluated using the well-known User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). Evaluation results revealed high performance across all user experience dimensions, surpassing standard benchmarks, particularly in efficiency and attractiveness scales. The proposed user-centric RESTful web services approach contributes to improving the design and development of e-learning systems, offering a foundation for future exploration of microservices architecture and AI integration to further personalize the learning experience and enhance system performance.