Quality of Experience and Learning in Information Systems

This chapter presents an overview of emerging technologies, focusing on factors and parameters that will be revisited during the following chapters. Emerging technologies are becoming popular, affordable and pushing for a technological revolution in many disciplines. Innovative technology solutions are proposed across the board, and increasing numbers and types of users are becoming dependent on them. This revolution has managed to find its way to educational platforms, applications and both physical and virtual learning tools. The challenge with such educational innovations is that the growth and change in the education practices has not been as rapid as the growth and change in the technology field. Therefore, the user participating in the merging of these two fields to create new solutions may find it challenging in terms of a comfortable experience.

This chapter investigates ways of adopting new educational technologies as part of learning in formal, informal and non-formal educational environments. Towards that goal, there is a need to revisit digital pedagogies to align with new technological capabilities and new user needs. In fact, digital pedagogies need to consider the idea of integrating technology in education as more than just a tool for learning but as an active part of the pedagogy, especially as the need for distance learning delivery and virtual learning environments is increasing. In addition to the idea of digital pedagogies, which are part of more formal environments, concepts such as digital citizenship, whole-school and whole-child approaches are presented to emphasise the widespread need for improved experience with education when it comes to any form of learning (informal, non-formal).

This chapter explores new technological learning environments, and focuses on distance learning platforms. The chapter considers the student preferences as a factor that can affect user experience metrics. Student preferences can be contradicting in group learning environments, and this can be even more challenging in distance learning environments. The chapter explores student preferences as reflected by individual learning styles and used game theoretic models to investigate the interaction between a teacher and the group of students as well as between the students themselves. The chapter tackles user experience and how this is affected by individual learning characteristics and preferences of the students, and also explores the teacher’s goal of satisfying those student preferences. Given that learning preferences cannot be completely revealed to the teacher, then ways of improving student experience must be investigated. In addition to the teacher perspective, the chapter focuses on the dynamics between the students themselves during some simple interactions where information processing preferences are used as the parameter that affects student’s overall positive experience.

This chapter shifts focus to the technology and discusses the use of cloud computing and how this is a trend that has many positive aspects for its users. However, the idea of trust comes into play because cloud computing technology is a very abstract concept for many users, and details of its operation are often not revealed. The chapter discusses the technology overall, but quickly shifts focus to a specific example and explores the interaction between a cloud provider and a cloud user from the perspective of trust. Trust between the two interacting parties can affect the user positive experience. This is even a bigger factor when considering a recurring interaction, or an interaction that is continuous over time. The chapter focuses mainly on the perspective of the user. The cloud provider is also significant in the discussion, as well as the elements of chance and overall policy. The overall aim is to discuss the motivation for an interaction that will provide a positive experience for the user and a positive payoff for the cloud service provider, as the interaction progresses in time.

This chapter discusses the interface aspect and explores the concept of user experience design and how this design is affected by emotions evoked by interface aesthetics and interface functionality. Concepts such as usability and sociability are presented, as well as challenges in decision-making that the designers face. The selected example deals with digital interfaces that allow for interactions between different users, and the design considers the element of user-to-user communication as part of the experience. The type of digital interface explored in the example is one used for mentoring, i.e. it allows for knowledge exchange between the different types of users. The design of the interface can play an important role in improving the user experience. When referring to experience in relation to a specific interface, we generally refer to elements such as interface usability and design features. To achieve improved UX, designers need to consider elements of user experience as part of the design process, and the overall process is referred to as user experience design.

This chapter addresses emerging AI technologies, but not from a technical aspect. It explores the need for ethics to be integrated with the technical design aspects during the development process of AI products. In order for designers and developers to be able to consider and include ethics in to this process, they have to learn ethics as part of their acquired skills. Therefore, the chapter deals with the teaching and learning aspects of ethics for emerging new technologies, especially AI. It is important to recognise that there are ethical issues associated with the development and use of such technologies. Furthermore, the chapter recognises the trend of an increase in the development and use of AI across many application areas, and ethics must be considered. Moving forward, necessary learning and teaching practices need to be integrated into software development courses. AI is not a standalone technology but a technology that is integrated with society and people, and needs to be understood in such an inter-disciplinary manner. The assumption that such courses exist and developers can decide to integrate them into ongoing professional development goals is what the chapter scenario addresses, in an attempt to demonstrate that expectation of ethical design by users can be reflected into resulting user experience from usage of the specific technologies.

This chapter returns the focus to the technology itself. It explores how technology can approach resource management in a user-centred manner. Specifically the chapter takes a look at a 5G resource management scenario to provide a network perspective on the user experience, more as a QoE evaluation in this case. It presents the 5G mechanism of network slicing, which is planned by 5G as a mechanism to address user QoE. Given that network slicing is a wanted solution to support user QoE in 5G networks, specific aspects are explored such as the need to limit the amount of slices in order to avoid a resource scarcity issue and the need to deal with groups of applications assigned to each slice. Groups of applications assigned to a specific slice have similar resource requirements and corresponding quality requirements, but resource management mechanisms still need to address the needs of individual services or applications. The challenge that arises from this grouping of services is that in such a scenario, each service or application has its own specific requirements in addition to the main target requirement for the group, which characterises any specific slice. The chapter presents a scenario that deals with having two applications sharing a slice and having some different requirements.