Evaluating the effectiveness of usability in I-folio at National University of Malaysia (UKM) using think aloud / Muhammad Syabir Suldin

UKM is the National University of Malaysia where it was established on 1968. There have been many efforts to implement a Malay-based language institution in all subjects. UKM nowadays have become a research university where many of their lecturers, post graduate students and PhD students are making research papers. UKM has 13 faculties as well as 16 research institutes of excellence in context of education. The main campus of the university is located in Bangi. The system i-folio is about to help students and lecturers to communicate and collaborate their work in a more efficient way. Students can discuss about their work, assignments, submit their task, view announcements and go through their courses of current and previous semester. Lecturers also can give assessment to the students and have discussion. This study would focus on the e-learning in higher education. Students pursue e-learning for the purpose of improving and enhancing their skills (Alias, 2012). Other purposes are to assist the students to build their self-learning skills and to maintain the interest and persistence to get the knowledge. In universities, the use of application of e-learning has increased rapidly (Paechter, Maier and Macher, 2010). Students will have the responsibility and make the initiative for the learning. Usability is very important in which it helps users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency as well as satisfaction. With the results obtained, the potential usability of i-folio can be enhanced to greater heights. Think aloud will be used to evaluate i-folio. A total of 5 respondents will take part. Their results will be documented and later analyzed for usability purposes. Recommendation based on scaffold will be suggested to enhance i-folio in order to strengthen its usability weaknesses. The use of scaffolding approach in e-learning is to assist the learning process and make it easier for the students to understand (Croker & Ashurova, 2012). Students can get confuse in several ways depending on their understanding. Scaffolding is an act of giving assistance to fasten the development of knowledge to the learners and also helps to contribute the basis for the self-learning of students or learners.