Abstract
Digital technologies have an increasing impact on our everyday life. A large impact of software engineering on society also means that socio-cultural factors are becoming crucial for software systems. The gender and cultural diversity have significant impact not only on the software development process but also on the overall sustainability of the software as well as on the society where the software is used. Thus, these diversity aspects should be analysed while developing a software system. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the gender and cultural differences in needs and usage of system features. Our focus is on eLearning systems used in Australia and Saudi Arabia, but the results of the study might be expanded to other application domains. To explore the differences, we applied a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods on the data collected from 177 participants. The results demonstrated the cultural and gender diversity may have a significant impact on user needs and preferences.
Paper Type
Event
Gender-Based Perspectives of eLearning Systems: An Empirical Study of Social Sustainability
Digital technologies have an increasing impact on our everyday life. A large impact of software engineering on society also means that socio-cultural factors are becoming crucial for software systems. The gender and cultural diversity have significant impact not only on the software development process but also on the overall sustainability of the software as well as on the society where the software is used. Thus, these diversity aspects should be analysed while developing a software system. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the gender and cultural differences in needs and usage of system features. Our focus is on eLearning systems used in Australia and Saudi Arabia, but the results of the study might be expanded to other application domains. To explore the differences, we applied a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods on the data collected from 177 participants. The results demonstrated the cultural and gender diversity may have a significant impact on user needs and preferences.
Recommended Citation
Alharthi, A., Spichkova, M., Hamilton, M., & Alsanoosy, T. (2018). Gender-Based Perspectives of eLearning Systems: An Empirical Study of Social Sustainability. In B. Andersson, B. Johansson, S. Carlsson, C. Barry, M. Lang, H. Linger, & C. Schneider (Eds.), Designing Digitalization (ISD2018 Proceedings). Lund, Sweden: Lund University. ISBN: 978-91-7753-876-9. http://aisel.aisnet.org/isd2014/proceedings2018/Transforming/1.