EFFECTIVENESS OF USABILITY LEARNING MODELS AND USER SATISFACTION IN UNIVERSITIES IN NAKURU COUNTY, IN KENYA.

Abstract

Effectiveness has been increasingly recognized as a significant quality dimension to determine the usability of mobile applications. Mobile learning applications on the other hand are different in many ways from those innovations due to the mobility nature of mobile devices. Learning institutions in Kenya especially, universities have implemented these scientific innovations as alternative approach to teaching and learning. The uptake was accelerated more with the advent of the Corona Virus pandemic which saw the education sector literally close down. As a way of having their students back to class, majority of the Universities in Nakuru County, adopted the online technologies. Despite the adoption of technologies, there are many complaints from the users, the students, on many inefficiencies coming along with the online learning platform. This puts to doubt the quality of user satisfaction of such technologies in enhancing teaching and learning processes. However, the advent of mobile technologies in learning context has increased the requirements for evaluating the effectiveness of usability learning models to align with user satisfaction in mobile learning applications. Existing metrics concentrates on ease to use, efficiency, reliability and security of the software which has a shortfall since the user is not subjected to contribute in the mobile application development. Even though mobile learning has been studied from different aspects of pedagogy environment and technology acceptance, there is little scientific and published research on effectiveness of usability of mobile learning applications. To fill up the gap, in this study, effectiveness of usability learning models and user satisfaction was established. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of usability learning models on user satisfaction in universities in Nakuru County, Kenya. To serve this purpose, survey questionnaires were issued to sample of university students in the ICT department in Nakuru County in Kenya. The analysis of structured item were mainly done by multiple regression and multivariate analysis from the results of the descriptive statistical tool. The findings from this study contributes to the body of knowledge by coming up with a number of usability guidelines as a significant quality dimension for the design of usable applications in mobile learning that can help improve user satisfactions and reductions in training costs. The decrease in costs attracts many researchers, interface designers and project managers to employ the usability assessment attributes when designing the interfaces for mobile learning applications. The study recommends that given the kind of empirical evidence from the university to consider having a system that is designed with memorability attributes to be considered for the clients to come back to the system from time to time hence improved user satisfaction.