Using Mozilla Hubs for Online Teaching: A Case Study of An Innovation Design Method Course

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, video conferencing platforms such as Zoom Online, MS Team Meeting, and Google Meets have been primary remote teaching tools. 3D immersive and non- immersive social platforms such as Mozilla Hubs have been studied as alternative tools for organizing remote teaching. This study aimed to assess the usability of Mozilla Hubs when applied to remote teaching and compared it to that of the widely used Zoom platform. An undergraduate course on innovation design methods was selected as the case study. Students enrolled in this course were divided into two groups. Distance learning was conducted through the Zoom platform for the first group of students. In contrast, the other group participated in the course activities through the Mozilla Hub platform within a non- immersive setting. The students in the Hubs group were requested to participate in the Hub pre-training class a week before the first week of the course’s lecture. Six everyday tasks requiring student interaction with each of the two platforms were selected for the study. Usability was measured in terms of efficiency and ease of use. The time taken to complete each of the selected tasks was used to measure the efficiency of each platform. The System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire was used to measure ease of use. For most tasks, both platforms yielded comparable results regarding task efficiency. The only exception is for the room transition task, where the results differed between the two platforms depending on whether the teleport or 3D navigation methods were chosen by students in the Hubs group in order to complete the task. Discussion on the factors affecting the efficiency of the room transition task was provided. Using the SUS questionnaire, it was found that both platforms yielded comparable SUS scores of 68.91 and 70.66 for the Zoom and Mozilla Hubs platforms, respectively. Similar ease-of-use results were due to the offering of the Hubs pre- training class to the students using the Mozilla Hubs platform.