Improving Usability of Educational Resources by Annotation Mechanism

Mobile device environment has increased demand for educational resources that can be accessed on and off-campus. The resources such as digital textbooks provide various features including multimedia, web-based application and annotation functionality, yet a number of usability issues remains for digital textbook to be a useful educational element. Especially, a digital textbook allows a learner to interact with both its contents and even other class members. Therefore, both self-directed and collaborative learning are the most important usability issues, and they have to be considered in use of digital resources. In this paper, we developed annotation interface which is one of most powerful feature in digital textbooks, and we conducted an evaluation for annotation user interface usability and whether its functionalities are effective and efficient for educational use. To do this, we applied combined and comparative metrics approaches to measure task performance of our system.