ISSN 2348-1196 (print) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology Research ISSN 2348-120X (online) Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp: (63-67), Month: January - March 2020, Available at: www.researchpublish.com
An Approach to Evaluate Software Usability of E-Communication Application 1
Hind Al-mayyan, 2Soha Al-Refai
The Higher Institute of Administrative Service, The Public Authority for Applied Education and Training, Kuwait Hi.almayyan@paaet.edu.kw, Sa.alrefai@paaet.edu.kw
Abstract: Educational Apps has become an important educational technology component in teaching and communication between the teachers and the students. It makes it possible for students to communicate, learn, collaborate and share ideas among each other with the aid of internet and technology development. This paper aims at exploring students’ attitudes towards the use of MyU App in the Higher Institute of Administrative Service in Kuwait. Finding revealed significate difference among the student’s attitudes towards MyU App with regard to their smartphone. Furthermore, results indicated that educational applications could be one of the promising pedagogical technologies to be employed in educational and communicational environment. Keywords: Educational Apps, communicational environment, students, Higher Institute of Administrative Service.
I. INTRODUCTION A mobile application technology, also known as an App, is a software specially designed to run on mobile-based devices, such as a smartphone or tablet computer. Mobile applications meant to provide users with similar but limited services to those accessed on desktop PCs. Smartphone application industry is growing and App users are increasing at a great scale [1]. This is obvious with over 15 billion apps downloaded since the inception of Apple’s App store [2]. Apps are being made and developed to help us in every aspect in our daily live routine. Mobile-based educational applications goal is to facilitate the learning experience. The main benefits of using apps in Education sector is to make teaching-learning process more interesting, also to develops interest and curiosity among the learners, and help to save the teaching and learning time for the teachers and students. Usability mobile-based educational applications is crucial to measures as it shows the general satisfaction of users. Specifically, if these Apps are integrated within the processes of educational organizations, as these Apps may either accelerate users’ knowledge or add to their experience. After deploying the App, a specific procedure needs to be followed to ensure the apps quality [3]. Usability evaluation is used as a mean to ensure quality and engage users after an initial launch of an App. This need is extended to academic management Apps to support the academic process and keep users satisfied. The intention of this study is to explore student’s attitudes towards a chosen web-based communication application from the student perspective. The paper starts with a summary of a literature review about the concept of usability and the standard usability standard tools. The literature review emphasises that the Arabic region lacks research in perceived usability and standard usability tools, and an overview specifically SUS is presented. To help advance the Arabic region in usability studies a standard usability tool is administered on MyU App. This study presents a female student perspective of usability evaluation of an academic management and communication App. It is administered using the Arabic-System Usability Scale (Arabic-SUS) tool [4]; an Arabic adaptation of the standard System Usability Scale (SUS) [5][6]. The research conducts psychometric evaluation on the perceived usability data of MyU App. Results are then presented followed by a discussion of the empirical implementation of Arabic-SUS. The results showed that students agreed that MyU App is considered an easy-
Page | 63 Research Publish Journals