Teacher Education Web Sites and Usability: Considerations for Accessibility and Effectiveness

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Teacher Education Web Sites and Usability
Considerations for Accessibility and
Effectiveness

• R. L. Erion
• Department of Educational Leadership
• South Dakota State University
• ralph_erion_at_sdstate.edu
• Available as a PowerPoint Show at
• http//learn.sdstate.edu/erionr/site03/

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Designing for Purpose

• When designers don't start by asking who will
  use the site, and what they will use it for, we
  get meaningless eye candy
• Jeffrey Zeldman

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NOTE

• Some of the results of this research may have
  been obsolete before the paper was sent in. The
  paper certainly does not reflect recent changes.
  The generalizability of educational research over
  time is a common concern. Because of changing
  content, technology, and users, problems with
  generalizability over time should be taken as a
  given when dealing with research which involves
  the web.

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Some Basic Questions

• 1. What purposes is the web site supposed to
  fulfill?
• 2. Who has to visit the site for those purposes
  to be met?
• 3. What will they have to do for these purposes
  to be met?
• 4. What can you do to make sure that those
  visitors will
• a) find the site?
• b) carry out the actions that will lead to the
  sites purposes being fulfilled?
• c) have a rewarding enough experience that they
  will persevere and return if necessary so that
  the purposes are met?

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Factors Considered in the Study

• Load Times (partly rural audience)
• Navigation (search, of clicks, clarity of
  purpose)
• Accessibility (disabilities, differing
  technologies)
• Design (Layout, legibility)

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Note

• Study considered prospective of rural students in
  particular.
• Study is very much preliminary. See Pearrow
  Web Site Usability Handbook or Nielsen
  Designing Web Usability for more thorough
  approaches.

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Institutions Studied (with Teacher Education
Sites)

• Arizona (TE)
• Colorado State (TE)
• Iowa State (TE)
• Kansas State (TE)
• Montana State (TE)
• Nebraska (TE)
• New Mexico State (TE) North Dakota State (TE)

• Oklahoma State (TE)
• South Dakota State (TE)
• Texas AM (TE)
• Idaho (TE)
• Minnesota (TE)
• Missouri (TE)
• Wyoming (TE)

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Searches

• Used the search engines for each University site.
• Probes were teacher education, teaching, and
  education.
• teacher education as a probe did not get to the
  teacher education web page in the first page of
  results for Missouri, Oklahoma State, Nebraska,
  or New Mexico State.
• Cause for concern, but try horticulture at a
  land grant institution and see how many pages it
  takes to get to a program with horticulture in
  the name as opposed to extension meetings.

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Searches (Continued)

• teaching did not get to teacher education for a
  number of schools.
• education did not get to teacher education in
  the first few pages of results for even more
  schools.
• This is not too surprising, but probably does
  reflect a lack of planning for making use of
  search engine characteristics.

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Finding Teacher Education without a Search Engine

• Many people do not use search engines. Not all
  search engines are easy to find.
• Labeling, number of pages to get from the
  university page to the teacher education page,
  and other navigation factors can influence user
  success.

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Accessibility

• Term often associated with the ability of an
  individual with special needs to make use of the
  site.
• Issues can include color, text vs. graphics,
  labeling graphics, etc.
• Bobby and CAST good resources
• Also issues of technological access.
• Software and hardware issues
• Above references and NetMechanic

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Accessibility Results

• Could not load all sites into Bobby, but no site
  loaded got a full pass.
• Problems included unlabeled graphics,
  non-standard code
• Text alternatives common. Not all obvious or at
  top of page.
• NetMechanic claimed browser compatibility
  problems for all. Most were not really problems
  although there may have been code that wasnt
  supported.

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Design Issues

• Page width and length.
• Depends on viewer resolution setting
• Most had most content above fold.
• Appearance
• Matter of choice? Readability concerns involved
  with choices of text color and background.
• Design Consistency
• Complicated by fact that Education often on
  different server and independently managed

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Conclusions

• Usability issues seem to be fairly common.
• Navigation problems may be most critical.
• Actually try to find information. During events
  when high school students come on campus, have
  some test your site for you.
• There seems to be a real tension between the
  simple (and fast) and the ornate (and slow).
• Page designs keep changing, making it difficult
  to see studies that link web features with
  decisions by prospective students.