Critique
Following is a discussion of the overall strengths and weaknesses of the EAC web site and recommendations for improvements.
Strengths | Weaknesses | Improvements Strengths
The greatest strength of the EAC web site is that it fullfills its primary objective. Students can use the web site to conveniently access advisement information that will help them to plan their careers and complete their degree requirements. Besides being able to locate pertinent information, students also feel that the web site is easy to use, and they are excited about using it.
The web site not only makes information more accessible, it also increases the accessibility of EAC advisors. Students can submit questions electronically to the EAC staff, that they might normally have to wait in line to have answered. In addition, the EACNews listserv promotes greater connectivity among students by allowing them to share relevant information with one another via email.
An additional strength is that the site can potentially reduce some of the demands on advisors' valuable time. Making frequently requested information available on the web eliminates the time spent by advisors answering the same questions over and over again. Advisors can then devote their time to those tasks that require greater attention and expertise.
Weaknesses
Many students had difficulty finding some of the information in the EAC web site. This was particularly true with the material on advisors' assignments, the link to major advisement centers, the announcement on course name changes, and the guidelines for placement files. The main reason for this confusion was that some information was located in areas other than where students expected to find it.
Closely related to the problem of finding information is the fact that students often didn't know what was contained in a particular menu category until they had clicked the button and accessed the page. Some students were also unsure of where individual hyperlinks would take them.
Another major weakness in the web site is simply the lack of information provided in certain areas. While the degree requirements are listed for each of the undergraduate programs in the School of Education, University General Education requirements are not yet included for most education majors. In addition, the information contained in the site is somewhat unbalanced with respect to the various programs available. There is substantially more information available for Elementary and Secondary Education students than there is for Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology majors. The Employment Resources section of the site is almost exclusively oriented toward helping El. Ed. and Sec. Ed. students find teaching jobs; the resources there for Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology students are scarce.
Improvements
I recommend that the following improvements be made to the EAC web site for the benefit of future users. First, some of the information should be easier to find. In many cases this involves listing the information in more than one area of the web site. To avoid unecessary duplications, information that might be accessed from more than one place could be stored in one area of the site and cross-listed in other relevant areas using hyperlinks. In terms of specific changes, I would suggest moving the table that lists course name changes from the Events and Announcements page to the Class Information page, and leaving a hyperlink in its place so that the information can be accessed from either page. I would also recommend including a link to the list of Major Advisement Centers on the EAC Advisors page, and revising this page so that the advisors' assignments are shown on the first page.
Another area of the web site where cross-linking would be very helpful is the Frequently Asked Questions section. While the material in this section is designed to answer student questions as completely as possible, related information can often be found in other areas of the web site. In these instances, additional hyperlinks could be added so that students can navigate both from the questions to other relevant areas of the site, and from these areas back to the questions. One such area is Education Placement. Both the Frequently Asked Questions and Employment Resources pages contain subsections dealing with Education Placement. I would advise linking these two areas together so that students can easily move from one to the other.
While cross-linking information will help students find information from more than one location in the site, there is also a need to provide explanations of what each category on the main menu contains, and more detailed descriptions of individual hyperlinks. I would recommend adding a hyperlinked table of contents to the site's home page so that students can view the major topics for each category in the main menu and navigate to them quickly. In addition, pages like Employment Resources that contain numerous hyperlinks, should include a description for each link explaining where it leads and what information is available.
Another improvement would be to expand the Employment Resources page to include more information for Audiology and Speech Language Pathology majors. I would conduct a World Wide Web search to identify five to seven useful web sites with career information specific to the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology programs. These outside web sites could then be linked to the Employment Resources page. In addition, since most of the students in these two programs go on to graduate school, it would also be helpful to include links to information on potential graduate schools and details on taking the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). The Frequently Asked Questions pages could also be expanded to provide more information relevant to Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology.
Finally, I recommend creating a page for each undergraduate program that would list General Education Requirements for that particular major. These pages could be linked to the major requirements for each program so that students can access their GE requirements and their degree requirements from the same location. In connection with adding the GE requirements, it would also be useful to create pages listing the requirements for undergraduate minors offered through the School of Education.
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©S. Todd Jones 1997