POSTER

Does it Work? Evaluating Educational Web Sites for Usability and Educational
Effectiveness

Ken M. Williams, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

ABSTRACT:

We have created a web site, The Biology Project (http://www.biology.arizona.edu), used by some 500,000 users per month around the world. With phenomenal growth of the site over the past few years, we needed to ask hard questions about how usable and useful our site is for students, teachers and the general public who comprise our diverse audience. We have embarked on a formal evaluation process, in conjunction with The University of Arizona's Learning Technology Center, to develop and apply appropriate metrics and observations to determine just how people use the site and what they learn from it. By the time of Slice 2004, we will have developed both an analysis and a set of recommendations for improvements to the site. Since evaluation plays (or should play) a key role in determining how to allocate resources, and since such evaluation procedures have been notably lacking in many similar endeavors, we hope to stimulate others to think about the important issues of usability and effectiveness in designing sites for educational use in medical and biological science education

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION:

While we all tend to feel that out development efforts are obviously necessary and often fruitful, our institutions and granting agencies are increasingly less sanguine about such claims without solid, scientifically based evaluations. We'll show how we approached the issues, the methodology we arrived at to establish meaningful measurements, and the preliminary results of the usability and educational effectiveness studies we have performed. This will provide at least a beginning approach that may prove useful to the many others of us facing similar demands for evaluating and justifying our efforts

Ken M. Williams

University of Arizona

Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Biology

Life Sciences South 444

PO Box 210106

Tucson AZ 85721

Phone: 520.621.3624

Fax: 520.621.3709

mailto:kenw@email.arizona.edu

Website www.biology.arizona.edu