Heuristic Evaluation of Microsoft Teams as an Online Teaching Platform: An Educators’ Perspective

Abstract

The way that education is delivered changed significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic to be completely online in many countries for many institutions. Despite the fact that they are not online teaching platforms, virtual meeting platforms were utilized to deal with this transformation. One of the platforms Philadelphia University utilized for the unplanned shift to online teaching was Microsoft Teams. This paper examines how heuristic evaluation may be used to guide the evaluation of online meeting platforms for teaching and focuses on the use of heuristic evaluation to assess the level of usability of Microsoft Teams. The level of Zoom’s usability is also evaluated using heuristic evaluation in order to compare it to that of Microsoft Teams and to assess Microsoft Teams’ overall usability in comparison to other platforms being used for the same purpose. Microsoft Teams was identified as having a few issues that need to be addressed. Additionally, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to Microsoft Teams’ usability were assessed.

Keywords

• Microsoft Teams
• usability
• usability evaluation
• heuristic evaluation