Define educational usability (for putative learners).

Learners are not the only users using educational tools. For scope, we will narrow our perspective down to users as learners whose goals are ultimately those we focus on most closely in educational technology (aside from teachers/facilitators). Learners might share some common goals like developing the concepts and skills in a specific topic while also working toward relating specific topics to broader areas of study (Squires and Preece, 1996). We’ll refer to these as our epistemic goals. In interacting with technology in pursuit of those goals, learners are also interacting with the interfaces of educational software, the operating systems, hardware, and associated peripherals (Squires and Preece, 1996). We might say our technological goals are to use these tools in pursuit of our epistemic goals. The topic-based epistemic goals also become embedded in the task-based objectives of the technology (or the other way around).

Educational usability is therefore about learners’ epistemic goals, the role of technology in achieving them, and the context around how the epistemic and technology related goals are intertwined. If our goals as learners are not to learn the technology for technology’s sake, but rather to achieve our epistemic goals, then educational usability must emphasize reducing the learning curve associated with the tool, its continued ease of use, and its pedagogic affordances for learners by the lights of the intertwined nature of the technology and the learning. What usability in this context needs to safeguard is making sure the tools do not compromise epistemic goals but support them (Van Nuland et al., 2017). Then, the relationship between learning and learning technology relates to how the tool selected not only supports or undermines the epistemic goal, but how it configures the learner to learn.