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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of personality traits on the perceived usability evaluation of e-learning platforms. In specific, perceived usability levels of the educational platforms and tools used in primary and secondary education in Greece are demonstrated. The impact which personality traits and other individual-related factors have on the perceived usability were also examined.

In total, 2,239 Greek primary and secondary education teachers participated in the study through an online survey. The system usability scale (SUS) and Big 5 personality test questionnaires were adopted, as well as a demographics questionnaire and nine platforms were examined: e-me, eclass, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Edmodo, Padlet, Skype and Zoom.

Most platforms were rated as satisfactory in terms of perceived usability as measured by SUS. SUS scores were not found to be significantly related with participants’ age, gender, private/public school, working relationship. Furthermore, openness to new experience and extraversion demonstrated the strongest positive correlation with perceived usability evaluation.

The current study used a sample of Greek teachers as participants, so the generalizability of results without considering cultural or organizational issues is of questionable validity. The Big 5 personality test is widely adopted; however, it seems that it does not capture comprehensively all possible dimensions of personality.

Acknowledging the correlations between personality traits and perceived usability for each platform, teachers may now choose the most user-friendly one depending on the personality traits. Designers can adapt their systems to meet users’ needs accordingly. Moreover, the reported results provide a frame of reference for the respective organizations and companies to compare the quality of user experience of their products and services. Thus, development costs of an e-learning platform/tool can be reduced accordingly.

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Perceived usability of a technological system affects the way users interact with it and consequently the whole learning experience. Thus, factors which may affect perceived usability and, in turn, the learning outcomes are of paramount importance and should be exhaustively examined. Giving that personality affects or is related to, other parameters related with technology (technology adoption, perceived and actual use, acceptance, interaction, perceived ease of use), this study addresses a significant research gap and sheds light to the before-mentioned issues.

The purpose of this study is to explore the characteristics and potential effects of teaching and learning through audio teleconferencing (dial-in) with a cell phone. In addition, the study aims to identify the associations between the audio teleconferencing and video teleconferencing in a 12-week postgraduate course.

The study is a cross-sectional survey conducted at the Department of Educational Innovations at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology from March to June 2020. The purposive sampling technique was used to sample 100 postgraduate students who registered for a course in the department. The data for the study were collected using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and 17-item self-administered eQuestionnaire. Multiple Linear Regression analysis, ANOVA, Independent sample T-test and Mann–Whitney U-test were used to estimate the differences in course achievements of students who experienced education through audio teleconferencing and those who experienced education through video teleconferencing.

In total, 59% of the participating postgraduate students chose to attend the synchronous online lectures via audio teleconferencing (dial-in). The participants gave a high SUS score (SUS > 80.3; Grade A; Excellent) for audio conferencing service. Among the students in the audio teleconferencing cohort, the results evidenced a strong positive linear correlation, (r (57) = 0.79, p < 0.05), between the individual adjective ratings and the SUS scores. There was marginal significance among demography of students in the audio teleconference (AT) cohort with regards to their perception about the dial-in lecture. There was no statistically significant difference, (t (98) = 1.88, p = 0.063), in the achievement test for AT students and video teleconference (VT) students. The instructors and the students were satisfied with the AT.

Based on the students’ preference, AT offers equal benefit as VT with regards to system satisfaction and perceived quality of online teaching. AT, as teaching modality, should be an option for students who reside in communities with high latency internet connectivity. It is recommended that instructors are trained on how to engage and motivate students via AT.

Higher education institutions in Ghana are facing decisions about how to continue learning and teaching through flexible pedagogy, while keeping their faculty members and students protected from the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these institutions have canceled the brick-and-mortar education and other conventional learning practices and have instructed faculty to adopt online teaching through synchronous video teleconferencing platforms. However, the learning experience is not the same for students who reside in remote or rural communities with low bandwidth. There is very little research in this topic, especially in developing countries like Ghana, and the present study aims to bridge the gap in the literature by exploring the characteristics and potential effects of teaching and learning through audio teleconferencing (dial-in) with a cell phone, in the context of a 12-week postgraduate course.

The purpose of this paper is to create a building rating system (BRS) with its bottom-up design model that can be carried out manually and in the future automatically.

The BRS is built on the basis of the structure of spatial representation framework for indoor navigation by people with visual impairment, which was validated with visually impaired people, and incorporated with building design standards and regulations from around the world. The BRS was afterwards validated by three groups of five experts in the related fields such as research and development, accessibility, and building and interior designs. Finally, the user evaluation was carried out by three focus groups of three experts in risk assessment to verify the usability of the system.

This paper provides the design and methodology of the BRS used for classifying the accessibility in buildings into four levels of classification for people with visual impairment navigating around the buildings. This system is evaluated with system usability scales (SUS), which is found to be in a “Good” level on average (72.2 SUS scores).

Success criteria used in the space classification are mainly created for people with visual impairment at this stage; other disabilities requirements must be taken into account for the next stage of the development.

The system can be carried out in the future automatically in the form of standalone software or plugins that can be integrated in buildings and interior design software to seek recommendations toward a creation of inclusive built environment.

This paper presents a design architecture of BRS with its details, description and success criteria used in the space classification.

The purpose of this paper was to develop a new interactive guiding system allowing people to use their own smart mobile devices, such as smart phones or tablet PCs, to activate the guiding services at the art gallery. The system provided interactions between visitors and exhibit items. It focused on the highly interactive functions between visitors and artworks authors as well as among visitors at both exhibition sites and social network sites (SNSs).

The system used quick response (QR) codes as the context aware elements, Facebook as the platform of SNSs, and smart mobile devices as the human-machine interfaces. Visitors carrying their own smart phones or tablet PCs can activate the guiding services by scanning the QR codes of the interested exhibit items. A system usability scale (SUS) survey was conducted to understand the visitors' perceptions on system usability. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the visitors' and authors' attitudes on releasing messages through Facebook.

The system was implemented at an art centre where lacquer artworks were on display. The SUS survey showed that 94 per cent of the participated visitors have satisfactorily rated this new guiding system, indicating rather high usability of the system. Most participated visitors agreed on Facebook as an ideal channel to release messages and they would pay more attention to the highly-recommended exhibit items. All the artworks authors consented to this new guiding system with potential power to disseminate their works over the cyberspace.

This new system possesses some important features in blending real world and cyberspace activities. Visitors at exhibit sites can become more informed and captivated because the interactive guiding system enables them to share knowledge and commentary opinions with others who were, are or will be at the same exhibition. It also allows people to share with their cyberspace friends who may have no times or opportunities to visit the exhibition. Most importantly, the new system may immensely expand the number of potential visitors in ways to make the authors and their artworks rapidly recognized.

Preliminary study into the changing task roles of administrative support staff suggests that their training and development may be unduly and unhelpfully influenced both by management whim and by the flaws inherent in the application of conventional performance appraisal techniques. Drawing from a review of the literature, questions the reasons for undertaking performance appraisals and develops the argument that conventional appraisal methodology typically concentrates on the “summary” (or comparative) effectiveness of employees at the expense of meaningful diagnostic evaluation. Further suggests that in order to determine training and developmental needs effectively, techniques need to be devised which combine analysis at a number of different levels. Presents a conceptual model, and proposes behavioural expectation scales as tenable mechanisms for facilitating gainful diagnosis and constructive needs analysis.

Security questions are one of the techniques used to recover forgotten passwords. However, security questions have both security and memorability limitations. To limit their security vulnerabilities, stronger answers need to be used. As serious games can motivate users to change their security behaviour, the purpose of this paper is to explore the features and functionalities that users would require in a serious game that educates them to provide stronger answers to security questions.

A lab study was conducted to collect users’ feedback on the desired game features and functionalities. In Stage 1, participants selected security questions/answers. In Stage 2, participants played a game and evaluated the usability and the provided features.

The main findings reveal that most participants found the current features and functionalities to be desirable; socially oriented functionalities (e.g. getting help from other players) did not seem desirable because users feared that their acquaintances could gain access to their security questions.

This research recommends that designers of serious games for security education should: use intrinsic rewards to motivate users to have a better learning experience; provide easier challenges during the training period and provide harder challenges only when the game determines that the users learned to play the game; and design their games for mobile devices because even users who usually do not play games would play a security education game on a mobile device.

The purpose of this paper is to present mobile solutions that aid in accessing open educational resources (OERs) in areas that have limited bandwidth resulting in poor internet connectivity and a gap between those with ready access to the online OERs and those without such access.

A system architecture was designed to support the repository-based, mobile-friendly, and hybrid online/offline characteristics of OERs. In a hybrid online/offline setup, the learner connects to the internet to obtain OERs from the repository via a process called syncing. Afterward, he may view any OER content regardless of whether he is online or offline. Mobile solutions based on Browser-Like Android App (BLAP)/HTTrack and Worona/Corona approaches were successfully implemented and evaluated by 139 respondents using the System Usability Scale.

BLAP/HTTrack and Worona/Corona solutions were well received. These were found to be both relatively usable, acquiring above-average usability scores of 73.2374 and 71.6546, respectively.

The findings of this study aim to contribute to the literature of hybrid online/offline model that addresses low bandwidth access of OERs in developing countries, which is not historically well provided.

The mobile solutions were designed to help those learners who experience internet connectivity difficulties in accessing OERs efficiently and updating them conveniently.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of the prototype of a mobile application for the enhancement of children's motivation for writing. The results are explored from students' and experts' perspectives.

This study is based on a field trial and expert evaluations of a prototype of a mobile application. The field trial data consists of questionnaire data collected from elementary school students (n=25) who used the mobile prototype. The expert evaluations (n=8) of the prototype were conducted based on usability and pedagogical heuristics. The main research question is how the mobile application motivates children to learn creative writing.

The findings suggest that the use of a mobile application can have potential in supporting children's creative writing skills and their motivation to complete writing tasks.

Due to a limited sample of students (only one class), and the mobile application of Ruff being only a prototype, the results cannot be directly generalized. In the future, longer and more comprehensive field trial periods with a larger sample group should be conducted.

These findings are valuable for teachers and researchers. This research points out both students' and experts' opinions of the prototype of a mobile application, Ruff, and its potential to motivate children to learn creative writing.

The purpose of this paper is to build a new transformational leadership typology by demonstrating high/low degrees of group- and individual-focused transformational leader behaviors – authentic type (high-high), group-oriented type (high-low) and individual-oriented type (low-high) – and to predict that the three types relate differently to follower responses (intention to sacrifice, cognitive trust of supervisor and affective liking).

This study uses an experimental scenario to generate the maximum levels of between-group variance among the three types. A total of 182 mainland Chinese full-time employees participated in the experiment.

Followers’ intention to sacrifice is equally high under the authentic, group-oriented and individual-oriented types of leadership. In addition, followers’ cognitive trust of supervisor is equally high under the authentic and group-oriented types and the lowest under the individual-oriented type. Finally, followers’ affective liking is equally high under the authentic and individual-oriented types and the lowest for the group-oriented type.

A new transformational leadership typology that combines high and low degrees of group- and individual-focused behaviors is established. Based on this typology, this study shows how the three types distinctively affect followers’ reactions, including intention to sacrifice, cognitive trust of supervisor and affective liking.

This study aims to explore the role of consumers’ expectation violation in brands’ negative eWOM management on social media. The effects of brand feedback strategies (i.e. compensation and causal attribution) and brand type (i.e. full-service vs low-cost) in consumers’ expectation violations and the impact of such violations on consumers’ satisfaction and responses to a brand (i.e. brand love and brand hate) were examined.

This study used a 2 (causal attribution: external/brand) × 2 (compensation: present/absent) × 2 (brand type: low cost vs full service) × 2 (industry: airline and hotel) between-subjects experimental design.

Results indicated that the presence (vs absence) of compensation can result in positive consumer expectation violations, which can lead to consumer satisfaction and brand love. Alternately, the absence of compensation can result in negative consumer expectation violations, which can lead to consumers dissatisfaction and brand hate. Moreover, brand type (i.e. full-service vs low-cost) significantly interacted with the presence of compensation in influencing consumers’ responses. The attribution of the cause did not significantly influence consumers’ responses.

This study highlights the importance of knowing consumers’ expectations when responding to negative eWOM on social media. Offering compensation is an effective strategy for restoring consumer satisfaction. Specifically, for low-cost brands, offering compensation can lead to even more favorable responses.

This study pioneers in exploring the roles of different brand feedback strategies and brand type in influencing consumers’ responses to brands’ handling of negative eWOM. This study revealed the underlying mechanism through the theoretical lens of expectancy violation and examined the impact of expectation violations on consumer satisfaction and brand love and brand hate.