Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

9 – Quality Assurance by Design
teaching with learning styles based on all stakeholders’
targets is not a disadvantage and, in this chapter, it is
worth considering a focus depending on active participation
in collaborative learning. Understanding the
controlling processes and improving them by evaluation
and assessment will eliminate existing problems.
Quality assurance by design
INVOLVING ALL STAKEHOLDERS IN THE PROCESS
OF DESIGN
Pedagogical heuristics: When designing systems for
e-learning, we must first determine the goal, the intention,
and specifications by collecting the relevant information.
As a result, learners will be free to justify why
they use the applications and their reasons will need to
match the organization’s intentions. On an operational
level, we can use several evaluation frameworks, known
as pedagogical heuristics. Heuristics provide a map to
work with, without extensive users’ evaluations. Norman
(1998), Shneiderman (2002, 2005, 2006), and Nielsen
(cited on his website, not dated) tried to help
designers and evaluators design systems for the users by
providing general guidelines. Norman proposed “seven
principles for transforming difficult tasks into simple
ones”:
(1) Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in
the head.
(2) Simplify the structure of tasks.
(3) Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of execution
and evaluation.
(4) Get mappings right.
(5) Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and
artificial.
(6) Design for error.
(7) When all else fails, standardize.
A second set of heuristics comes from Shneiderman’s
Eight Golden Rules:
(1) Strive for consistency.
(2) Enable frequent users to use shortcuts.
(3) Offer informative feedback.
(4) Design dialogues to yield closure.
(5) Offer simple error handling.
(6) Permit easy reversal of actions.
(7) Support internal locus of control.
(8) Reduce short-term memory load.
Both sets of rules can be used as evaluation tools and as
usability heuristics.
Nielsen (n.d.) proposed other usability heuristics for
user interface design. His are more widely used:
• visibility of system status
• match between system and the real world
• user control and freedom
• consistency and standards
• error prevention
• recognition rather than recall
• flexibility and efficiency of use
• aesthetic and minimalist design
• help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
• help and documentation.
His heuristics mostly refer to information provision interfaces
and do not explicitly support learning in communities
using social software platforms. New heuristics to
support the social nature of the systems are needed after
the migration of the socio-technical environments on
the Internet. For example, whereas Suleiman (1998)
suggested a check of user control, user communication,
and technological boundary for computer-mediated
communication, Preece (2000) proposed usability for
online communities supports navigation, access, information
design, and dialogue support.
Pedagogical usability (PU): When e-learning started
to be widely used in mid 1990s, new heuristics with a
social and pedagogical orientation were needed. With a
social perspective in mind, Squires and Preece (1999)
provided the first set of heuristics for learning with
software Similarly, Hale and French (1999) recommended
a set of e-learning design principles for reducing
conflict, frustration, and repetition of concepts.
They referred to the e-learning technique, positive reinforcement,
student participation, organization of
knowledge, learning with understanding, cognitive
feedback, individual differences, and motivation. To
date, learning design is concentrated on information
provision and activities management aimed at the individual
instead of e-learning communities. Thus there
exists an absence of common ground between collaborative
learning theories and instructional design. Lambropoulos
(2006) therefore proposes seven principles for
designing, developing, evaluating, and maintaining
e-learning communities. These are: intention, information,
interactivity, real-time evaluation, visibility, control,
and support. In this way, she stresses the need to
bring e-learning and human-computer interaction
(HCI) together.
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