Open access to educational resources in energy and sustainability: Usability evaluation prototype for repositories

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show a PhD dissertation research plan, which aims to assess whether the users’ experience of users to perform various tasks in an open access repository, increases by integrating Discovery Tools. The tasks to perform by the users are management and information design, dissemination and searches of open educational resources (OER) of sustainability energy. This research aims to develop a usability evaluation prototype which will offer new insights in the design of the information architecture. In the first stage, the criteria will be selected to measure the level of usability of the tasks to evaluate and develop the analysis of the current interactive design of the web repository. In the second stage, will consist of measure, once implemented the Discovery Tools in the web repository and check the usability level increase in relation with the criteria. In this paper you could find aspects as the motivations and the context in which it will develop this research, state of the art, hypothesis, research objectives, aspects of the methodology of the research, developed under the method of mixed layout, the current an expected contribution, the results and the validation and dissertation status. The results will contribute for detect new criteria and parameters for provide flexible interfaces, specifically for the web repositories, which are a part of the technological ecosystem of the scientific activity.