Construction of a Questionnaire to Measure the Learner Experience in Online Tutorials

Online tutorials are efficient tools to support learning. They can be easily delivered over company web pages or common video platforms. In commercial contexts, they have the potential to reduce service load, replace product documentation, allow customers to explore more complex products over free trials, and ultimately simplify the learning process for customers. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. But if tutorials are not well-designed, then these goals can not be achieved. Therefore, it is important to be able to measure the satisfaction of learners with a tutorial. We describe the construction of a questionnaire that measures the learner experience with tutorials. The questionnaire was developed by creating a set of candidate items, which were then used by participants in a study to rate several tutorials. The results of a principal component analysis suggests that two components are relevant. The items in the first component (named Structural Clarity) describe that a tutorial is well-structured by a logical sequence of steps that are easy to follow and understand. The second component (named Transparency) refers to the way the tutorial communicates the underlying learning goals, prerequisites, and concepts and how they can be applied in practice.