Digital storytelling platforms have proven to be a great way of bringing cultural heritage closer to people. What lacks is a deeper understanding of the user experience of such systems, especially in multi-platform digital storytelling. For the last three years, we have been developing a project called Spotlight Heritage Timisoara, which is at its core a digital storytelling platform for the city of Timisoara (Romania), soon to be European Capital of Culture in 2023. The project consists of a website, mobile applications, and interactive museographic and street exhibitions. This paper presents a multi-platform usability evaluation study which employed semi-structured interviews, observations, think-aloud protocol, SUS questionnaire, Net Promoter Score and Product Reaction Cards to gather insights from 105 participants and reveal usability problems in the Spotlight Heritage context. We found out that the four platforms, i.e., interactive touchscreen table, desktop/laptop, mobile and Augmented Reality, have very good usability scores, are considered accessible and useful, work seamlessly together, and create user satisfaction and loyalty, across demographic groups, having the potential to bring people closer to cultural heritage.
Information found nowadays on the World Wide Web is generally regarded as limitless. Hence emerged the need to find methods for organizing data in order to get better information retrieval. Organizing web content does not implicitly mean structuring data by attaching meaning to the information published on the web ? at least not yet. For instance, content management systems (CMS) are tools that provide means of organizing web data. Nevertheless only a handful of CMSs have a semantic layer. The following paper offers an in-depth description of the logic and the implementation behind the method used to integrate microformats ? also known as the ?lower-case semantic web?? into the widely known learning content management system Moodle, personalized to suit the needs of students attending the Politehnica University of Timisoara. It is an easy to use, easy to integrate solution that does not require any changes in the core of Moodle and, moreover, it does not overrun the server, as the decision block runs on the users' computer
UniCampus, online learning environment started in 2014, as an attempt to provide the first Romanian language MOOC-like Massive Open Online Courses. For the development of the DigiCulture project we decided to extend the existing UniCampus platform with a new DigiCulture theme. This paper presents the technical development, based on the Moodle framework, with new user interactions. The DigiCulture project develops free, online short courses dedicated to adults with low digital skills. The shortage of digital skills in Europe reported in 2016 in “European Digital Progress Report EDPR” of the European Commission: 45% of Europeans have insufficient or no digital skills. As there are big differences between the countries that are partners in DigiCulture, we propose an integrated approach for course development, but with national personalization as language, study cases. These implementation and personalization are presented in this paper.
The management of distance education activities in the Politehnica University of Timisoara have different aspects and requires several development instances. Recently, the online development included also tools needed for human resources management and time management. Politehnica University of Timisoara uses, since 2009, the university Virtual Campus CVUPT, a Moodle based development. As many of Moodle instances are used in distance education settings, where activities happen also face-to-face in university labs, any off-platform relevant activities need to be reported and quantified manually. This is especially important in our university educational setting, where reported activity affects many teaching/learning indicators, including the academic staff' time reports. In order to properly mitigate this situation, we have developed a tool allowing Moodle integration with the official reporting procedure used by the academic staff from the distance education courses in our University. In this paper, we present the new methodology, the development process as well as the initial evaluation, by comparing the process of obtaining results from offline, previous form-based reports submitted in the past, with those obtained using the online tool in CVUPT. The evaluation run by the eLearning Center team revealed important feedback on time management, that will generate more change, many updates and other adaptations of the reporting tool in CVUPT. We can conclude that, for its first iteration, the online reporting tool was seen as a positive development, conducted to better time management of the distance education academic staff. Several proposed improvements are already in plan for the second development.
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