BiblioLab Project: Teachers, Parents and Students’ Perspectives About the Usability and Usefulness of an Educational Distance Learning Platform

Abstract

The dialogue between science education and literary education increases the interest of students and promotes the development of skills essential for the learning process. Despite its potential for fostering learning, this articulation -science and literature -is scarce in schools. In this context BiblioLab appears as a platform that intends to articulate these two areas of knowledge, fostering skills such as creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. In this study we report the development of BiblioLab, a platform that offers Open Educational Resources (OER) developed through a design science research methodology to be used by teachers, parents and students. Students, parents and teachers were invited to use BiblioLab and to provide us feedback during the entire development process. Also, after exploring and completing one activity, teachers, parents and students were invited to complete a questionnaire and an interview. With this, we aim to understand how what we observed throughout this first phase of implementation supports the usability of the platform, and to detect the main difficulties and co-construct solutions to overcome these. Our results suggest that: students, teachers and parents have enjoyed using BiblioLab and consider that its platform and associated OER, achieve good levels of functionality and usability. The results also highlight the need to find additional solutions to foster autonomous and collaborative work in science and literary education (at distance) in primary schools.