Evaluation of the quality of authoring systems

✍ Scribed by Avram Eskenasi; Roumen Radev

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1989
• Weight: 503 KB
• Volume: 5
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-9287
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-9287(89)80009-3

✦ Synopsis

The quality of educational software is to a large extent decided by features and capabilities of authoring systems. An attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of several more or less known authoring systems with an easy-to-use evaluation instrument. The approach is based on a general method for software quality evaluation developed by the authors. A relatively large set of about 60 characteristics of authoring systems has been determined. Several well-known authoring systems have been screened on these characteristics. Each of these sample systems has been classified as excellent, good, or poor, according to the authors' views and on the basis of available references. Any new authoring system screened against the same characteristics can automatically be classified as excellent, good, or poor. By making use of properties inherent in the method, the set of characteristics used in the evaluation could significantly be reduced. By interchanging samples with authoring systems to be evaluated, as well as by other experiments, the reliability and stability of this approach were proved.