Assessing the Usability of a Tool for Developing Adaptive E-learning Processes: an Empirical Analysis Gennaro Costagliola, Andrea De Lucia, Filomena Ferrucci, Carmine Gravino, Giuseppe Scanniello Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica – Università di Salerno Via Ponte Don Melillo – 84084 Fisciano (SA) – Italy {gcostagliola, adelucia, fferrucci, gravino, gscanniello}@unisa.it Abstract The correlation between the effort to develop a learning process and early size measures could be used to assess the usability of an employed tool. In particular, when the measures are obtained from the learning process specification and they are relevant effort indicators we can assert that the technical competences of instructional designers are not relevant for the tool usage. We present initial results of applying empirical analysis to confirm a previously usability study performed on the ASCLO-S (Adaptive Self consistent Learning Object SET) editor, a visual language based tool for developing adaptive learning processes. 1. Introduction The academic and industrial realities are proposing a good number of software tools supporting instructional designers during the development of e-learning processes delivered via the Web. Concerning e-learning processes, instructional designers have to consider their structure in terms of didactic contents, dependences, and assessment rules. In general, the definition and the development of learning processes are influenced by: content domain complexity, knowledge presentation, and multimedia objects enhancing the didactic contents. The didactic contents composing an e-learning process should be developed considering self-expectations, satisfaction, welfare, and diversities among students. These problems may be addressed by the use of adaptive learning processes, which on one side improve the learners’ knowledge augmentation and on the other side require more effort in terms of number of person-hours to design and develop them. The effort required should decrease when instructional designers have appropriate didactic domain knowledge, and technical competences. However, the usability study proposed in [10] revealed that technical competences do not influence the effort to define and to develop adaptive learning processes by using the visual language based tool, named ASCLO-S (Adaptive Self consistent Learning Object SET) editor [8]. In that study the value of visual languages in the definition of learning processes was assessed, by asking the designers to use the tool and fill a questionnaire in. The designers had heterogeneous technical competences and good teaching experiences. The usability results revealed that designers appreciated very much the required effort to learn and use the tool. This paper aims at confirming the results proposed in [10] using an empirical analysis. We first investigated the correlation between early size measures and then the effort to develop adaptive learning process. The identified measures are achieved from the specification of learning processes. We performed a linear regression analysis [16] to establish the relevant effort indicators in the definition of learning processes and to obtain models for estimating the required effort to develop them. The achieved models can predict with a good accuracy the effort to develop a learning process using the values of the identified size measures. It is worth noting that the measures are independent from both the adopted visual formalism and the background of an instructional designer. This confirms the findings of the usability study described in [10]. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the related work. The ASCLO-S editor and the empirical analysis are described in Section 3 and Section 4, respectively. Final remarks conclude the paper. 2. Related Work In the context of usability of e-learning systems studies have been devoted to assess e-learning frameworks [1] and didactic contents [2]. Only marginally the usability of tools for creating didactic contents has been investigating [10]. Indeed, these tools are often developed for instructional designers with specific technical competences. For example, Cloete and Kotzé in [9] discussed the design of an authoring tool to create interactive didactic contents. In order to support non- technologist instructional designers, this tool was Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06) 0-7695-2632-2/06 $20.00 © 2006 IEEE