Usability: an approach to assessing open source elearning courseware

Open source movement plays a significant role in the development of Open Education Resources in higher education. Open source eLearning courseware (OSeLCW) is an initiative within this movement. Nowadays, many institutions particularly in developed and developing countries are involved in designing and developing web-based OSeLCW platforms in order to distribute their courses free of cost and to be accessed openly by users all over of the world. Usability is a key factor for the success of such web-based eLearning platforms. In the context of eLearning, the concept of Usability has two dimensions; Technical and Pedagogical. This paper concerns with technical usability of web-based OSeLCW platforms and presents specific evaluation tool in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of such promising e-learning environments.