A user-centered design process to ensure the quality of the new e-classroom

his work-in-progress describes the redesign of the virtual classroom using User-Centered Design (UCD) methodologies. The UCD approach is used to ensure the quality of the resulting virtual classroom so that it meets students’ needs and expectations. This project began in September 2005 with the user requirements gathering phase. Focus groups, interviews and user tests with students and faculty were the techniques used to obtain information about the usage of the current classroom as well as its positive and negative aspects from the student point of view. These user requirements were the base for the iterative design process. Several prototypes of different fidelity were created and tested with students to evaluate their usability and added value. For Fall semester 2006 a set of pilot classrooms were launched to evaluate the new classroom in a real learning setting. With the results from this evaluation, a second set of test pilots will be run before deploying the new classroom university-wide. When this will happen, we can ensure that the new product is going to meet the learners’ needs and that it will be useful and usable for them thanks to applying a UCD development process.

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