Investigating and Comparison of Affordances on Popular Open Source Learning Management Systems and Undergraduate Students’ Usability Evaluation of Moodle at The University of Zambia

Abstract

Many educational institutions are nowadays integrating the traditional face to face instruction methods with the online which can be synchronous and/or asynchronous. Synchronous learning means that although you will be learning from a distance, you will virtually attend class sessions each week, at the same time as you’re the instructor and classmates while asynchronous learning is a general term used to describe forms of education, instruction, and learning that do not occur in the same place or at the same time. It uses resources that facilitate information sharing outside the constraints of time and place among a network of people. LMSs are standardized platforms that are selected from broad categories and used in education institutions to support both synchronous and asynchronous methods of teaching and learning. Selecting the best LMS can be determined and directed by factors such as the type of usage, the type of users, functionality of the system, the needs of the system users and financial resources available for the system, just to highlight the main ones. However usability and functionality are key in the selection process. This study employed document and system analysis to uncover the affordances available of popular free and open source LMSs; Atutor, Chamilo, Sakai Moodle and Canvas. The results showed that there are teaching and learning features that can be considered as integral and must have when choosing an LMS. The results also showed that each of the five LMSs does have feature that may and/or may not be available on the other four LMS. The results showed further that the LMSs may and/or may not support a particular feature using external plugins and third party software. This study made use of the System Usability Scale (SUS) to determine the student’s usability evaluation of Moodle at the University of Zambia. An experiment was set up where participants were required to perform tasks on Moodle after it was installed and set up on a Cloud server, after which each of the participants responded to the SUS in Appendix C which helped to understand the undergraduate student’s usability evaluation of Moodle LMS.