Avaliação de usabilidade do biotax no ensino remoto de entomologia médica

Abstract

As the understanding of biodiversity is fundamental in Biology study, biological thinking requires knowing and practicing taxonomic identification. Identification keys are typical instruments used to guide the identification of specimens of living beings. They can be on paper or be software. Although there are investigations on the use of identification key software as a pedagogical resource, little has been investigated about its quality of use. This paper reports a usability evaluation of the BioTax software in two remote classes of Medical Entomology in undergraduate courses at UFRN in 2020. The students performed 2 taxonomic identification exercises and 1 exercise to create an identification key with BioTax. Then, 15 students answered an online questionnaire about their opinions regarding the experience of using BioTax and questions from the System Usability Scale (SUS). The average of the general results in SUS was 81.3, which indicates an excellent usability of BioTax. The participants highlighted ease of use, practicality and simple and clean layout as good characteristics of BioTax. They also reported problems with learnability and efficiency, functional errors and suggestions for new features