When Eyes Tell a Story … An Eye-Tracking Approach Towards Creating a Fit-for-Purpose Learning Management System for Higher Education

Learning Management System is a vital organ of any university that exists in today's digital era. Whilst these platforms are meant to promote quality teaching, learning and assessment, developers and designers often ignore learner's visual behavior when implementing or maintaining these applications. Consequently, most of these applications appear as poorly designed and populated by disorganized content- eventually provoking tedious navigations and interactions at the learner's end. Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University uses Learning Mall to organize coursework, assessment and facilitate staff-student interactions. However, there is an absence of evidence whether any usability study on the Learning Mall, vis-à-vis learners' gaze behavior and visual attention, has ever been carried out at the University. This paper reports an ongoing study which is at the very preliminary stage, and linked with Eye-tracking, Participatory Design and Mixed Methods approaches to bring learner-centered improvements in the Learning Mall.