This presentation was about the resource libraries (now LOR in 7.x) in ANGEL and was presented by some of the staff of the University of Waterloo. They have a rather large resource library available which faculty are allowed to contribute to (peer-reviewed). It contains learning activities along with global documents such as student policies. They did a small usability study to see how it could improve. Some hilights:

  • 10 users, all familiar with ANGEL
  • only 2 completed all tasks
  • most had problems finding the IR to begin with.
  • instructions were hard to find. Were in the RL but had to go to course to import stuff
  • 90% liked the availability of the IR
  • most failed to find the macro ability of the HTML Editor (i was unaware it existed)
  • Task: import and set-up item from IR. 70% failed, none fully completed (some copied and pasted between windows instead of importing)
  • only 50% found link to merlot
  • only 40% were able to link to the IR without workarounds

The findings match up with some of my experience. The upcoming version does alleviate some of this by allowing you to publish from the LOR instead of only using the import screen. More usability studies would be useful though.