“Designing a graphical user interface to deliver a graphic design course online: a user-centered approach” by Kokil

 This paper presents an interaction design to deliver a graphic design course online synchronously. It introduces the visual features that are added to two standard online teaching support interfaces at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) – FirstClass and myCourses (Table 1). The New Model, still in the beta stage, includes innovative visual tools that can be customized by the user: (i) a scale for expressing opinions, (ii) scrolling pictures of online users, (iii) uploading artworks onto the whiteboard in vector and bitmap formats, and (iv) zooming in and out of artworks on the whiteboard. The four features are created to improve the interactive experiences of students in an online learning environment, especially when delivering a graphic design course. The interface aims at creating a rich interactive virtual environment amongst its users by incorporating the above visual tools that are integrated into the video, chat, and whiteboard. The interaction design is evaluated for its functionality, usability and aesthetic quality with questionnaires. The aim is to build on the existing online communication systems myCourses (Figure 1) currently in use at RIT, to deliver a graphic design course online.  

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