Full length articleProposed features of an online examination interface design and its optimal values
Introduction
The growth in online education over the last few years has been marked by a competitive academic environment (Stowell and Bennett, 2010, Trenholm, 2007). Moreover, a new concept that has emerged from the World Wide Web is eLearning (Alavi & Leidner, 2001). The phenomenal growth of eLearning can be attributed to the fact that it is a financially viable venture for institutions. In fact, according to a new report by The Global Industry Analyst (Xiao & Ji, 2011), the eLearning market is projected to reach $107.3 billion by 2015.
Computer technology has proven itself to be generally useful in the field of education, in particular, as teaching and learning tools. In terms of the evaluative phase of the teaching-learning process, online examination is an increasingly important component of online courses. Generally, an examination or a test is a tool that evaluates knowledge or skills learned in a particular subject. Accordingly, along with the growth of eLearning, online tests evolved rapidly as well (Stowell & Bennett, 2010). Largely, however, online course examinations are used to evaluate the student's knowledge using computer technology without causing undue effects on the traditional university course examination— that is, tests taken with pens, papers, and invigilators while the traditional examination system using pen and paper requires more effort on the part of students and invigilators, a growing concern of educational institutions is improving the standards of online tests. Considering the increasing use of online examinations, the development of network technology policies has opened avenues on the conduct of online tests. Doubtless, university students can benefit from these services. Of late, experts have noted the need for a more efficient and convenient system of conducting online examinations by directing attention to all the elements of online examination, including the online test environment. Largely, efforts to streamline online examinations focused either on ensuring the credibility of test results by improving security and user authentication techniques, or by trying to improve the online test display and design features for a more efficient, convenient, and usable interface. However, a majority of prior literature on eLearning examinations focuses largely on security concerns, and has proposed the best user authentication systems to prevent online examination threats such as cheating and impersonation (Abdel Karim and Shukur, 2015). On the other hand, according to our knowledge, hardly any research focuses on the online examination design features. Hence, this study proposes to identify the specific design features of online examinations, which will facilitate the efficient and convenient process of taking online tests. Accordingly, a literature review was conducted to determine the potential elements or design features that make up online examination interface design and the possible values that could be used with those features. In addition, an experiment was conducted to identify the most common values selected by students for each design feature.
This paper is presented as follows: Section 2 is an overview of interface design and user characteristics; Section 3 presents the methodology; Section 4 shows the results; Section 5 discusses the results, and Section 6 summarises the paper and proposes future research directions.
Section snippets
User interface and user characteristics
Recent developments in information and computer technology and the use of the Internet worldwide underscore the importance of user interfaces (Calvary et al., 2003, McDaniel, 1994). New technologies are emerging for the comfort and convenience of the user and thus, user interfaces are becoming the key discriminator for many products (Park and Hwan Lim, 1999). Interface design is a part of the field of study called Human-computer interaction (HCI) where Human-computer interaction is the study of
Method
In this study two stages were conducted: a literature review to identify online examination design features, and subsequently an experiment to specify the most common values that could be used in online examinations.
Data extraction (online examination design features)
In this section, we present the results of the Literature review.
There are several samples of online examination design features, where Table 2 summarises some of the collected literature within four sections: design features, description, appropriate values, and references. It shows nine design features that may be important in online examination interface designs:
Fig. 3 shows the summary of potential values that could be used for online examination interface design.
Experiment results
In this section, we present
Discussion
From previous results, we can observe that users have variations in their online exam preferences. There is a clear variation based on the “group questions” feature, whereby the most common feature was group question by “Topic”. In addition, there were three common types of “font type” that the students preferred: “Arial”, “Times New Roman” and “Tahoma”. The favourite font sizes for the respondents were 14 and 12 with 49% and 26% respectively. Meanwhile, regular font style was the most common
Conclusion
Students taking online examinations deal with the interface, which is made up of many elements largely applied in the questions display to help the students to take the test comfortably and efficiently. There are nine possible design features in an online examination interface design, namely font (i.e., type, size, colour, and style), background colour, sound alert, questions group, counters and number of questions per page. These features could be affected due to user characteristics;
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Khazanah Asia Scholarship (Palestine).
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