Design and Usability Evaluation of A Lora-Based Climatic Dataset Pipeline For Higher Education

This paper reports an Education-and-ICT case study that transforms a campus LoRa sensor network into a pedagogical asset for data-driven agricultural learning in higher education. At the Universidad Estatal de Bolívar, a low-power LoRa deployment generates a climatic dataset used in practical activities across the last three levels of a Software Engineering and ICT program. The dataset and its access workflow were embedded into course practices to support competen-cies in data engineering, analytics, visualization, and IoT-oriented software de-velopment. Usability was assessed with a task-based protocol (four core tasks: locating time-windowed node data, filtering historical records, exporting the da-taset, and validating dataset structure) and the System Usability Scale (SUS). With 63 students, task completion reached 97.2% overall, with failures concen-trated in navigation/filtering and dataset-structure validation, while dataset export achieved 100% completion. SUS scores were consistently high across levels (91.2–95.3; overall mean 93.7), indicating strong perceived usability. Findings highlight that the main bottleneck is not access to data but cognitive demands in validating and interpreting exported structures, motivating targeted scaffolding to enhance autonomy in lower levels.