Chapter two provides an overview of the work already undertaken relating to the domains of e-learning, culture, usability and language. In particular, it explores the barriers that hinder the successful use and adoption of e-learning websites. The review demonstrated a connection between four main factors: e-learning, culture, language, and usability. E-learning plays a crucial role in the education sector and the combination of traditional learning techniques together with e-learning could improve the quality of learning provided to students and learners. Universities and other institutions in the higher education sector prefer to use e-learning websites for reasons of flexibility and because of their capability to connect with people remotely. Moreover, e-learning today
is not just relevant to the education sector; it also extends to the business sector as it creates numerous investment opportunities for companies.
Culture is a collection of many factors that affect the direction of thinking, a person or a
group’s judgement about things around us negatively or positively. Hofstede’s
dimensions reveal various differences in cultural factors between Arabic culture and Western culture. These differences include different ways of thinking, ways of evaluating ideas, the nature of an individual’s view on society A few studies have investigated the relationship between culture and the web design of Arabic websites (Khushman, 2009; Marcus, 2009). The review has shown that more studies are needed to explore the impact of culture on the behaviour and judgment of Arab users on websites. Moreover, this chapter showed that no usability guidelines have been developed yet for Arabic e-learning websites or systems. Usability is a complex area which needs more attention in order to create websites that have a global appeal (to different cultures and nationalities). Localisation of web designs (Making web designs more engaging for localities) also needs more consideration in order to meet the needs of local users.
Chapter two also defines how website usability is related to culture. However, the literature review revealed no design guidelines explaining how usability is influenced by culture. Such knowledge would assist web designers in designing the right websites for local people. Different cultural groups have different perceptions of usability; therefore, these differences can sometimes affect the way in which websites are perceived. This means culturally different groups may have differing judgements about the same website. Likewise, user interaction with the website is directly affected by the usability of the website and the quality of the content used throughout the website.
Another factor that plays a major role in the quality of a website is the quality of any translation, which needs to consider the culture of the intended users.
In addition, chapter two discusses the role of usability in e-learning websites. Progression forwards by the e-learning domain is slow and it has many problems that obstruct the development of e-learning. This slow adoption may be related to a lack of understanding of the impact of usability on the quality of e-learning websites.
There are three main sources for obtaining usability guidelines in the West. These are as follows: International Standard ISO 9241-151, Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). The goal of ISO 9241-151 is to deliver guidance for those considering WWW user interfaces and to increase the usability of education websites. Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines were created to help web designers, website managers, website maintainers, usability specialists, researchers and students achieve the target of the use. This source contains 209 guidelines within 18 chapters. The Joint Information Systems Committee provides 121 guidelines relating to academic websites and is aimed at customers who are considering online courses, digital libraries, portals and personalisation. However, the literature shows there are no usability guidelines for e-learning websites that are dedicated to helping designers, maintainers, staff, companies and students create or use usable e-learning websites.
This chapter explores how culture, language and usability affect the users and designers of Arabic e-learning websites. The literature review revealed that there are no studies which have evaluated the effects of these factors on the design of Arabic e-learning websites. Therefore, the Arab world requires more research on creating dedicated usability guidelines that improve the usability of e-learning websites and the interaction of users.
Finally, this chapter highlights the various differences between Arabic culture and English culture in respect of many factors. The views of the two cultures on evaluation are different. Arabic society is more conservative, more collectivist, more masculine, has more power distance and has more long-term distance. In addition, the differences in religion between the two cultures play a major role on the life style; for instance, what is appropriate in the English culture may be perceived as inappropriate in the Arabic culture. The languages (i.e. Arabic and English) are also radically different in respect to characters, morphology and the direction of writing. All these differences need to be taken into account by designers when developing e-learning websites for Arab users. This means designers need to design e-learning websites that respect the religion and the culture of the target users (in this case, Arab users).
The next chapter, chapter three, discusses the methodology of, and the procedure for, the studies conducted in this research.
3 Chapter Three: Research Methodology
3.1 Introduction
This chapter details the research methodology followed to answer the main questions of this research as specified in chapter one. In essence, it describes the processes of this research to collect and analyse data. It starts by describing and justifying the research philosophy, the research approach, the research process and the objects of investigation adopted in this research. It then continues by describing the structure of the e-learning website developed to answer the questions in chapter one. Moreover, this chapter presents the data collection methods used in this research, along with the type of data collected and the ways in which these data were analysed. This chapter also provides an overview of the case study methods and the fuzzy set theory methods used to validate the results of the experiment. Finally, this chapter discusses the validity and reliability characteristics of the data as well as the possible ethical issues surrounding the studies of this research.