Pedagogical Importance of Learner Interface in Web-Based e-Learning Content

Abstract

e-Learning has been revolutionizing education system based on the concept of learning occurring at any time and any place. Today the whole world adopts their life to the concept called “new normal” due to COVID-19 pandemic. When applying the new normal idea to the education system, online education is more important than ever. At present, online learning is applicable not only to learn academic work but also it helps to learn extracurricular activities for students as well as conducting training sessions for employees. With no face-to-face instructions, e-Learning provides a safe and effective alternative to classroom learning. Therefore, carefully designed and attractive content is the success of an e-Learning program that can keep the audience focused and interested. Hence, evaluating the web-based e-Learning content is necessary. The evaluation process usually consists of pedagogical evaluation and content evaluation. This research study is mainly focused on automating the pedagogical evaluation component. In automating the pedagogical evaluation, identifying inconsistencies is the biggest challenge faced by pedagogical experts in the current manual reviewing process, because different institutions use different checklists to pedagogically evaluate their e-Learning content. Developing a calibrated checklist to be used in the pedagogical evaluation process is the solution. This calibrated checklist was devised based on studying existing checklists, followed by creating a questionnaire, and a survey conducted with pedagogical experts to identify the essential review factors considered in the pedagogical evaluation process. Analyzed survey results identified that, “Learner interface of the course” was the most important review factor. A simple and user-friendly interface is a key component in enhancing the quality of online courses. This paper focused on giving comparative clarification about factors considered under ‘Learner Interface’ in the web-based e-Learning content.