A Structured Approach to Evaluate Collaborative Educational Virtual Environments

In this paper we present a 3D collaborative educational virtual environment, which was development by utilizing an iterative applied throughout development cycle. The main propose was demonstrating applicability of an evaluation framework idealized by the authors. Our evaluation framework is supported by the Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) proposed by Escudeiro [3]. This framework uses the standard of reference ISO 9126 (is an international standard for the evaluation of software) and measures the quality relatively to a hypothetical ideal system, whose quality is assumed to be 100%. It was created with main objective to assess the educational software. The 3D collaborative educational virtual environment was evaluated both during his development lifecycle in the laboratory and in the user's natural work environments. Our first evaluation suggests that the quality assessment must be done. The environments are created to be use by teachers and students in order to aid the teaching / learning process and in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics, and neither has characteristics related with to the area of study. Index Terms Software quality, Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments..