An Empirical Study Of MOOC Usability

With the development of education information,MOOC has been widely used in the field of education.There has emerged many MOOC platforms both at home and abroad,such as courser,edX and Chinese university MOOC,etc.They provide learners with abundant quality resources,therefore has been widely recognized and accumulated a mass of users.To MOOC,a website,usability plays an important role in learning outcomes and promotion.The main purpose of our study is to discuss the usability of MOOC,and propose design and optimization suggestion to three MOOC platforms used in study.First,we interviewed long-time users of MOOC,and identified three commonly used MOOC: Chinese universities MOOC,xuetang online and coursera.Then we identified seven factors affecting MOOC usability.Second,we used eye tracking and questionnaire to measure their usability.The experiment was conducted by adopting single factor within-subject design.The independent variable was platform type,and dependent variable was usability.At last,suggestions of optimization were proposed in discussion part.The main conclusions of this study are the following:1.Factors influence MOOC usability are: effectiveness,efficiency and satisfaction,learnability,understandability,interface quality,cognitive load.2.Among the three MOOC platforms,the usability of China university of MOOC is the best,followed by xuetang online,and the last is coursera.