Abstract:
There are many advantages in using the web as a learning medium. Out of these, some of the most important are that students are able to find their required data efficiently and according to their individual rhythm; time is not wasted as students use it as they want. However, it is not an easy task to accomplish this all even sometimes it can lead to frustration. There is a need to design usable educational website, where the students can participate in educational activities. We realise that often our students go to the sites but they leave because they do not manage to find what they are searching for. An informational web structure, proper page layout, easy navigation and accessibility features provide the comfort to students and they feel pleasant when interacting with the academic websites. This study is a reflection on a usability evaluation of educational websites for the subject of modeling web usability guidelines for educational websites. This paper investigates usability of higher educational websites in Asia. First, an online Google application survey form was designed using Google Forms and used for the evaluation of web usability and student response. After a thorough analysis, a concise model was designed to evaluate the usability of educational websites called \"Web Usability Evaluation Model\" (WUEM). We evaluated ten top-ranking engineering universities in Asia against the features listed in the WUEM. The evaluation analysis shows that the academic websites are partly usable in their informational structure, navigation and also weak in accessibility. The evaluation shows a detailed structural description of what needs to be improved in these websites to enhance their usability. The proposed WUEM helps in an effective and easy evaluation of websites by the web developers. The research will help academic web developers to enhance the usability of their websites by considering such simple features listed in WUEM.
Page(s):
183-192
DOI:
DOI not available
Published:
Journal: Science, Technology and Development, Volume: 31, Issue: 2, Year: 2012