The project goal is to contribute to the enhancement of education and training systems. E-learning represents one among the different applications of information technology (IT) that can provide a very powerful tool for the development of the new society. E-learning can be used in different contexts of everyday life such as school, home, work environment and so on, and has the major advantage to be also used as distance tutoring system to provide educational tools in many situations in which direct teaching is not possible.

But, in order to be effective, an e-learning system must be able of actually transferring the knowledge to the user, and this ability is highly influenced by its level of functionality, usability and acceptability.

The learning level reached by a subject can be evaluated by using typical psychological tests and questionnaires, but these methods require a high level of collaboration from the examined subjects, and results are mainly qualitative and analytic. Moreover, the learning cognitive processes assessed with these methods are only the results of learning but not the strategies or dynamic processes involved during such learning.

In this frame, the main objectives of the project are:

• to define and validate a quantitative method for the evaluation of the level of functionality, usability and acceptability of e-learning systems;

• to identify guidelines for the development of functional, usable and acceptable e-learning systems;

• to develop “optimised” prototypes of e-learning systems based on the identified guidelines.