We had five volunteer students to come over for one to one in-depth interview. We mainly asked questions as designed in the questionnaire. Overall, students feel that homepage is a nice and efficient supplement to class meetings. They can easily catch up with the class and prepare for the next class. This CS 3604 homepage is especially aboundant in information, full with interesting related readings and useful reference. The debate engine gives ample opportunities to participate in the class outside of class meetings. But another general comment of this homepage is "could be better."
A big problem they pointed out is the total separation of Career Homepage and Professionalism Homepage. It is to their understanding that the course is offered in two parts. But total separation do create some confusion and inconvevience at the beginning. For example, lots of students took for granted that calendar is for the whole course, and didn't notice that in career homepage there's another set of homework due days.
Based on the above observation, a new structure of CS 3604 homepage is suggested. Right now, the course homepage at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604 has two links to Professionalism Home Page at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/support/FrontEnd and Career Home Page at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/careers. Both Professionalism Home page and Career Home Page have their own description, guidelines and calendar in this course. The suggestion is that, combine the basic elements of a course together to the course homepage, which includes Announcements and New Information, Syllabus, Course Outline, Calendar, Department and Class Policies. Then students can follow the link to Professionalism Home Page and Career Home Page to check individual requirements.
Most of the subjects like the Career Home Page, it's succinct, everything is out at the top. However, some subjects think it needs some breakup of the topics. And they like the debate engine. The thread of every argument is clear and easy to follow. However, two of them pointed out that once "linearize" the page, one can't delinearize it; and another one doesn't like the "Back to Debate" button, it takes students out to the debate topic page of the whole semester instead of the debate students is working on. But Professionalism Home Page contains a lot more information, and most of the problems.
In the Professionalism Home Page, there's no link to Announcements and New Information. The description of this line is that Announcements and New Information would be posted to course LISTSERV. Most of the subjects think it would be nicer if this link does work. Email is simply not as reliable as a web page. Mail server might goes down, there might be too many junk emails in the mailbox that make the recepient overlook the important ones, the recepient might simply delete it by mistake or leave it in the mailbox and forget about it. A link to the announcement archive would remind the students about things related to this course, what to expect if different than what was put in the calendar.
The link named by Assignments takes students to the assignment section in the syllabus, which is a page listing various kinds of assignments in the course and links to the guideline of these assignments, while links to actual assignments is not provided. But actual assignments and their due dates are what the students looking for most of the time. Student would have to click on another link by the name of "assignments" to get that information.
At the same time, the naming of listed items and links in the page is not quite descriptive of their content. For example, there's an item of assignment by the name of "Preparation assignments". Though the subitem of it is talking about individual presentation preparation and group debate preparation, but the grading part of this assignment is the individual presentation or group debate rather than the preparation process itself. Another item is "Written Homework Assignments", with two different links named by "Written" and "Assignments". It turns out that link "Written" brings to a page of guideline for writting assignments, while link "Assignments" brings to the assignment calendar with links of assignments and their due days. This could introduce lots of confusion. It might be better to be changed to "Written Homework Assignments" and "Guideline for Writting Assignment" respectively.
CS 3604 homepage is a huge site, there're more than 4000 pages (citing Dr. Lee). Hence it's impossible to discuss in every detail. Yet they do have some common problems.
1) Since it's a huge site, pages are refered to each other recursively, it is necessary to keep the naming convention consistent. For example, in the Calendar, at the top of the page, there's a link by name of "Debates", which lands on a debate calendar at the end of this page. In readings column of week of Oct 6, there's a link by name of "On-line debates", which links to the guideline of on-line debate. On Wednesday of week of Oct 20, there's another link by name of "Debate Summaries", which also links to the guideline of on-line debate. While in the guideline, there's no mention of debate summaries at all, this linkage doesn't seem to be valid. There's no obvious relationship between the link names and the place they link to.
2) Some of the link pointing to place which does not make much sense on first sight. In the assignment calendar, on Oct 13, assignment #3 is due for peer review. There's a link for "peer review", but click on the link would take the student to the "Sample" part of guideline for writting assignments. In this Sample part, there's no clear connection between the references and peer review.
3) In the above example, it might be useful to add some brief description of the reference. This would enable the student to make the connection faster between the reference he\she is going after with the work he\she is trying to accomplish on hand. And this is generally true for all the reference in this site.
4) The notes part contains lots of links both in width and in depth. It's not consistent. Some class notes are ordered one slide per page, some are combined into a whole page. Lots of links scattered all over the text, and some link could leads to a pretty long story. After reading the story, instead of getting extra information, students couldn't possibly remember the thread he/she was following, and they can't recreate the path and read this story at a later time. As one of the subject put it, "if I find something interesting, I bookmark it, otherwise I won't be able to get it later". Some links might lead the user to an outside page without warning, which most of the users are trying to avoid. And links scattering everywhere make it a nightmare to maintain. A suggestion is, group all the reference. Any link that lead to a page more than a sentence would be put off until the end of the text. This could keep the user from side tracted, and there would have more space for a brief description of the reference. Also, seperate the reference outside of CS 3604 course site so that the user know where he/she is going.
5) As this is a huge site, it's very easy for users to lose track without a good navigator. It would be useful to put a line of buttons at the top and bottom of every page that enable users go to several main pages (e.g., Assignments, Calendar, etc.) with one click.
6) Subjects has different feelings about the graphics in the web page. Some think they're funny. But others, especially those with a monitor of low resolution, think the graph is too big, it's impossible for them to get any text without scrolling down the page. And those using modem to surf the web think it takes too much time to load.the path and read this story at a later time. As one of the subject put it, "if I find something interesting, I bookmark it, otherwise I won't be able to get it later". Some links might lead the user to an outside page without warning, which most of the users are trying to avoid. And links scattering everywhere make it a nightmare to maintain. A suggestion is, group all the reference. Any link that lead to a page more than a sentence would be put off until the end of the text. This could keep the user from side tracted, and there would have more space for a brief description of the reference. Also, seperate the reference outside of CS 3604 course site so that the user know where he/she is going.
7) Except for the course materials, this site contains a lot of other stuff: information for other institutions, organizations concerned about prefessional ethics in computing, similar course from other universities. Subjects feel that these things should be grouped together and put in another page rather than giving a place in the main pages.