User-friendly Instructional Design Tool to Facilitate Course Planning

Abstract

Plan and take into account the whole picture of the course before it starts, must be a prerequisite for the instructors. At the Tecnol´ogico de Costa Rica, a problem related to course planning has been identified; it is the low detail of the courses planing, associated with the relation between the content and the competences, evaluations and learning objectives, there is not a logical flow on the courses planning. Also the tools used by instructors are not well integrated with their LMS (Learning Management System), which turns the course planning task difficult to track and reinforce. In this context, a web-based application called Instructional Design Tool has been created with the goal to aid instructors in the course planning task, making easier and guided this process by intuitive and usable tool integrated into an LMS , and based on the instructional design theories. To validate our approach, we applied System Usability Scale and eye-tracking tests. The results were interesting, inasmuch they shown the utility of the tool and some improvement points to do.