The Assessment of the Usability of Digital Educational Resources: An interdisciplinary analysis from two systematic reviews

Abstract

International reports analyzing current and future educational trends with an emphasis on technologies applied to education declare the importance of the design and application of digital educational resources. Guaranteeing its usability allows obtaining an adequate resource with a high pedagogical and technological quality. The objective of this paper is to analyze the empirical researches to determine if exists convergence between educational and computational researches on the assessment of the usability of digital educational resources. To fulfill the objective, the PRISMA protocol was used to carry out two systematic reviews and answer the two scientific questions. The results show that in few cases an adequate integration is achieved between: (1) the criteria for assessing usability as established by Software Engineering; (2) the methods and computational models to assess usability and, (3) the criteria established in pedagogical usability. Due to these shortcomings, a model for evaluating the usability of digital educational resources is proposed as future work. It concludes with the importance of interdisciplinary integration to assess the usability of digital educational resources.