1) In addition to the course materials, the CS 3604 web site contains many other resources (i.e., information for other institutions and organizations concerned with professional ethics in computing as well as for individuals affiliated with similar courses offered by other universities). Students taking the CS 3604 course may be able to find the information they need more easily if such "outside information" is grouped together and put in another page rather than included in the main pages.
2) One major problem is the total separation of the Professionalism Home Page and the Careers Home Page. It is understood that the course is offered in two parts, but this separation within the on-line information source can initially create some user confusion and inconvenience. For example, many of the students assume that the Calendar provided in the Professionalism home pages contains information pertaining to the entire course; many students have failed to notice that another set of homework due dates is included on the Careers Home Page. Based on the this observation, a new structure is suggested for the CS 3604 Web Pages. Currently, the course home page at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604 has two links: one to the Professionalism Home Page at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/support/FrontEnd, and one to the Career Home Page at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/careers. Both the Professionalism Home Page and the Career Home Page have their own descriptions, guidelines, and calendar. The suggestion is this: combine the basic elements of the course together in the course home page (i.e., include Announcements and New Information, the Syllabus, Course Outline, Calendar, and the Department and Class Policies). This will enable students to follow the link to the Professionalism Home Page and the Career Home Page in order to check individual requirements.
3) In the Professionalism Home Page, there is no link to Announcements and New Information. Information provided on this page states that announcements and new information will be posted to a course LISTSERV. It would be better, however, if an "Announcements and New Information" link was provided. Email is simply not as reliable as a web page. Mail servers may fail; junk emails may cause the recipient to overlook important messages; and/or the recipient may simply delete an important message by mistake or leave it in the mailbox and forget about it. A link to the announcement archive would remind the students about information related to the course that is new or that differs from information originally included on the calendar.
4) The "Assignments" link takes students to the assignment section in the syllabus; this is a page listing various kinds of course assignments and links to assignment guidelines. Links to actual assignments, however, are not provided, even though actual assignments and their due dates are what the students are looking for most of the time. Currently, students must click on another link by the name of "assignments" to get this pertinent information. It would be better if an "Assignment Calendar" link was included in this page; this would enable the students to get to the requirements associated with a specific assignment more easily.
5) The naming of listed items and links in the pages is not descriptive enough of the content represented. For example, in the Assignments page, there is an item entitled "Preparation Assignments." Though the sub-item refers to individual presentation preparation and group debate preparation, the graded portion of this assignment is the individual presentation or group debate (not the preparation process itself). Another item is entitled "Written Homework Assignments," and it contains two different links: 1) "Written," and 2) "Assignments." The "Written" link brings the user to a page of guidelines for writing assignments, while the "Assignments" link brings the user to the assignment calendar. This could introduce a great deal of confusion, therefore it may be better to change the names of these links to "Written Homework Assignments" and "Guidelines for Writing Assignments" respectively.
6) Since the CS 3604 web site is very large, pages refer to each other recursively; therefore, it is necessary to keep the naming convention consistent. For example, at the top of the Calendar page there's a "Debates" link which moves the user to a debate calendar at the end of the same page. In reading the column corresponding to the week of October 6, there is an "On-line debates" link which links to the on-line debate guidelines. On Wednesday of the week of October 20, there is a "Debate Summaries" link which also links to the on-line debate guidelines. While in the guideline section, no mention of debate summaries is made; therefore, this linkage does not seem to be valid. There is no obvious relationship between the link name and the place at which the link terminates.
7) Some of the links point to places which do not initially make sense. For example, in the assignment calendar, assignment #3 is due for peer review on October 13. There is a link for "peer review," but clicking on this link takes the user to the "Sample" part of the guidelines for writing assignments. In this sample portion, there is no clear connection between the references and the peer review process. In this example, it might be useful to add a brief description of each reference. This would enable users to make the connection faster between the reference he\she is attempting to obtain and the work he\she is trying to accomplish. This is generally true for all the references provided in the CS 3604 site.
8) The notes portion of the CS 3604 web site contains several links (both in width and in depth) and is not consistent. Some class notes present one slide per page while others present multiple slides on a single page. Many the links are scattered throughout the text, and some links lead to relatively long articles. After reading a given article, instead of getting extra information, users may find it difficult to remember the thread that he/she was following and may find that they are unable to recreate a given path. As one of participant put it, "if I find something interesting, I bookmark it, otherwise I won't be able to get it later." Some links may lead the user to an outside page without warning, and links scattered everywhere can be a nightmare to maintain. A suggestion is this: group all of the references. Any link that leads to a page containing text of more than one sentence should be included at the end of the text, and links to the background should be included at the beginning of the text. This should keep the user from becoming side-tracked, and there should be more space for a brief description of the references. Also, separate the references outside of the CS 3604 course site or give a warning to the user that he/she must leave the CS 3604 site to check the reference link.
9) Since the CS 3604 site is extremely large, it is very easy for users to lose track of their position in the absence of a good navigator. It would be useful, therefore, to put a set of buttons at the top and bottom of every page to enable users to go to several main pages (e.g., Assignments, Calendar, etc.) with a single mouse click.
10) To facilitate the redesign of the online debate tool provided in the CS 3604 web pages, the following suggestions are offered:
- Make the direct link from the CS 3604 Home Page to the online debate system (i.e., the "click here" link) more prominent. This could be accomplished by increasing font size and/or placing the link near the Professionalism Home Page and Career Home Page links.
- Provide text explaining the difference between Public and Restricted access right at the point where those links are displayed.
- Provide a delinearize feature so that users dissatisfied with the results of a linearization can reverse these effects without going back and coming forward again. Another option is to leave contributions abstracted by subject after linearization to provide consistency with the previous display method.
- Change the verbiage of the "Back to Debate" button to "Back to Top Level of Debate."
- Provide the user with the ability to login from any point in the public access state so that the user does not have to perform unnecessary backtracking to accomplish this goal.
- A "neutral" submission option might encourage a proliferation of neutral responses, therefore changing this artifact is not encouraged in light of the ultimate goal at hand.
- Provide users with a direct method of quoting and/or referencing text from previous submissions when making their own contribution.