EDUCATIONALORGANIZATIONAL WEBSITE 1 SERVING CURRENT MEMBERS – MEETING INFORMATION

EDUCATIONALORGANIZATIONAL WEBSITE 1 SERVING CURRENT MEMBERS – MEETING INFORMATION




Differences Between an Educational and Business Website

Educational/Organizational Website


  1. Serving current members – meeting information, and student involvement.

  2. Recruiting new members – why should they join and benefits of belonging.

  3. Officers – meet the officers (photos and short bio).




Needs Assessment Strategic Plan requires the following steps.

  1. Identify the client.

  2. How can the website help with existing operations, publications and other business and PR aspects.

  3. Determine organizational goals and identify ways that the website will help achieve these goals (marketing, communication, and informative).

  4. Use various analysis means (surveys, etc.) to identify members’ needs.

  5. Identify the online community that is likely to view this site.

  6. Identify the goals of the website.

  7. Identify whether the organization has an identifiable image (logo, graphics, etc.) or needs one. Will it translate to an online version or does it need modification?

  8. Determine what images will best represent the client and how they need to be used along with text, user interface for an effective site representation.

  9. Develop a time table for completion (prototypes, evaluation, and revising, updates, and other development aspects).

  10. Determine the graphic and content components needed for the site and how you will get the necessary information from the client. How much you can do depends upon the client's cooperation. So this relationship is essential and critical for successful site development.

  11. Develop initial prototypes. The client will more than likely give you examples of what he/she likes. This helps, but you may come up with something very different in the end.

  12. Fulfill marketing needs.

  13. Determine an evaluation technique after the preliminary site is done with a sample group of subjects viewing and critiquing the site.

  14. Revise the site according to the evaluation stage findings.

  15. Quality check throughout the process.

  16. Establish procedures for maintaining and revising the site.

  17. Use product like Webhound for continual evaluation of website and its usage.



Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics

The Online Community is the Internet community. For a specific business or organization it could be the intended and actual viewers of your site, such as employees, management, and customers/viewers. Is there ongoing information about your product that would keep them coming back?

Shneiderman’s Interface Design Principles


  1. Recognize the diversity (novice/first-time users, knowledgeable intermittent users, and expert frequent users) and note interaction styles useful for each.

  2. Use the Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design.

    1. Strive for consistency.

    2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts.

    3. Offer informative feedback.

    4. Design dialogs to yield closure.

    5. Offer error prevention and simple error handling.

    6. Permit easy reversal of actions.

    7. Support internal locus of control.

    8. Reduce short-term memory load.

  3. Prevent errors (correct matching pairs, complete sequences, and correct commands).

  4. Extensive Guidelines for Data Display (organizing the display and getting the user’s attention).

  5. Guidelines for Data Entry.

  6. Balance of Automation and Human Control

  7. Practitioner’s Summary.
    Put together a “guidelines document that records organizational policies, supports consistency, aids the application of tools for user-interface building, facilitates training of new designers, records results of practice and experimental testing, and stimulates discussion of user-interface issues.”

  8. Researcher’s Agenda.


Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability: The practice of simplicity. Indianapolis: New Rider.

Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing the user interface: Strategies for effective human-computer interaction (3rd Ed.). Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.

Dick and Carey Systems Approach Model for Designing Instruction

EDUCATIONALORGANIZATIONAL WEBSITE 1 SERVING CURRENT MEMBERS – MEETING INFORMATION















“Contemporary view of instruction is that it is a systematic process in which every component (i.e., teacher, students, materials, and learning environment) is crucial to successful learning,” and advocates of this position typically use the systems approach to design instruction (shown above).

“A system is technically a set of interrelated parts, all of which work together toward a defined goal. The parts of the system depend on each other for input and output, and the entire system uses feedback to determine if its desired goal has been reached.”

“The instructional process itself can be viewed as a system. The purpose of the system is to bring about learning. The components of the system are the learners, the instructor, the instructional materials, and the learning environment. These components interact in order to achieve the goal…. To determine whether learning is taking place, a test is administered. This is the instructional system thermostat. If learner performance is not satisfactory, then there must be changes enacted in the system to make it more effective and to bring about the desired learning outcomes…. There is no single systems approach model for designing instruction.”

Components of the Systems Approach Model

First Step—Determine Instructional Goal

Determine what you want learners to be able to do when they have completed your instruction.

Second Step—Analyze the Instructional Goal

Determine step-by-step what people are doing when they perform that goal. “The final step in the instructional analysis process is to determine what skills and knowledge, known as entry behaviors, are required of learners to be able to begin the instruction.

Third Step—Analyze Learners and Contexts

In addition to analyzing the instructional goal, there is a parallel analysis of the learners, the context in which they will learn the skills, and the context in which they will use them. Learners’ present skills, preferences, and attitudes are determined along with the characteristics of the instructional setting and the setting in which the skills will eventually be used. This crucial information shapes a number of the succeeding steps in the model, especially the instructional strategy.

Fourth Step—Write Performance Objectives

“Based on the instructional analysis and the statement of entry behaviors (what learners will already have to know or be able to do before they begin the instruction) you will write specific statements of what it is the learners will be able to do when they complete the instruction. These statements, which are derived from the skills identified in the instructional analysis, will identify the skills to be learned, the conditions under which the skills must be performed, and the criteria for successful performance….

Entry behaviors are defined as the skills that fall directly below the skills you plan to teach…. They are the initial building blocks for your instruction. Given these skills, learners can begin to acquire the skills presented in you instruction. Without these skills, a learner will have a very difficult time trying to learn from you instruction… [They] are key components in the design process.”

Fifth Step—Develop Assessment Instruments

Based on the objectives you have written, develop assessments that are parallel to and measure the learners’ ability to perform what you described in the objectives. Major emphasis is placed on relating the kind of behavior described in the objectives to what the items require.

Sixth Step—Develop Instructional Strategy

Given information from the five preceding steps, identify the strategy that you will use in your instruction to achieve the terminal objective. The strategy will include sections on pre-instructional activities, presentation of information, practice and feedback, testing, and follow-through activities. The strategy will be based upon current outcomes of learning research, current knowledge of the learning process, content to be taught, and the characteristics of the learners who will receive the instruction. These features are used to develop or select materials or to develop a strategy for interactive classroom instruction.

Seventh Step—Develop and Select Instruction

In this step you will use your instructional strategy to produce the instruction. This typically includes a learner’s manual, instructional materials, tests, and an instructor’s guide. The decision to develop original materials will depend upon the type of learning to be taught, the availability of existing relevant materials, and developmental resources available to you. Criteria for selecting from among existing materials are provided.

Eighth Step—Design & Conduct the Formative Evaluation of Instruction

Following the completion of a draft of the instruction, a series of evaluations is conducted to collect data that are used to identify how to improve the instruction. The three types of formative evaluation are referred to as one-to-one evaluation, small-group evaluation, and field evaluation. Each type provides the designer with a different type of information that can be used to improve the instruction.

Ninth Step—Revise Instruction

The final step (and the first step in a repeat cycle) is revising the instruction. Data from the formative evaluation are summarized and interpreted to attempt to identify difficulties experienced by learners in achieving the objectives and to relate these difficulties to specific deficiencies in the instruction. The data from a formative evaluation is used to revise the instruction and to reexamine the validity of the instructional analysis and the assumptions about the entry behaviors and characteristics of learners. It is necessary to reexamine statements of performance objectivities and test items in light of collected data. The instructional strategy is reviewed and finally all this is incorporated into revisions of the instruction to make it a more effective instructional tool.

Tenth Step—Conduct Summative Evaluation

Although summative evaluation is the culminating evaluation of the effectiveness of instruction, it generally is not a part of the design process. It is an evaluation of the absolute and/or relative value or worth of the instruction and occurs only after the instruction the instruction has been formatively evaluated and sufficiently revised to meet the standards fo the designer. Since the summative evaluation usually does not involve the designer of the instruction but instead involves an independent evaluator, this component is not considered an integral part of the ID process per se.

EDUCATIONALORGANIZATIONAL WEBSITE 1 SERVING CURRENT MEMBERS – MEETING INFORMATION



Stage 1—Analysis
During this stage, all the questions about resources, issues, and constraints that may impact the successful design and implementation of an instructional system are asked and answered. This would include the following questions.

Stage 2—Design
“During the design process, instructional objectives are prepared along with evaluation metrics for learner performance and program evaluation. Subject matter experts provide input as the organization, structure, and sequence of instructional modules or objects are developed, including the logic and design flow of the instruction…. Communication requirements (synchronous or asynchronous) are outlined.”

Stage 3—Development
“During the development phase all audio, video, and text materials are collected, prepared, or created. Interfaces requiring programming are developed; databases are created, including repositories for indexed and reusable objects. The complexity and bandwidth requirements for the learning objects to be developed should be within the capability of the technical infrastructure.”

Stage 4—Implementation
“The course is put into full production during the implementation phase, including training both learners and instructors on how to use the different technologies involved."

Stage 5—Evaluation
“Assessment and evaluation is a process that should take place during the entire project. Different models of evaluation will be presented in chapter six."

Source: Belanger, F. and Jordan, D. H. (2000). Evaluation and implementation of distance learning: Technologies, tools and techniques. Hershey, USA: Idea Group Publishing.


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