THREE SUPER WBI WEBSITES EVALUATION III

Site: UW CSE142 online

Subject: Procedural programming, basic control structures, file processing, arrays and defining objects.

URL: http://www.online.cs.washington.edu/

This course site contains three links on the home page: CSE142, faculty information and other course online. The majority part is under the CSE142 section which includes course materials, schedule, lecture active, and lecture list four subsections. All the information includes hand out materials, course schedule, classroom assessment tools, quizzes, homework, homework solutions, exams and resources, are all here. The next section offers students lecture schedule and handout in both PDF and PPT format. From the lecture archive section, students can get the lecture in web, videos, and audios format. This section is also allowing students to download all the materials online. If learners want to check the lecture schedule, they can go to the lecture list section which is also the last section. It offers students the titles of all the lectures and the length of each lecture. This website uses a tree model to design the web pages and the offering of lecture in videos give feeling as they are facing to the instructors physically. Furthermore, the information offered in this site including the lectures, schedules, and other materials with details is very useful to learners to keep up with the learning pace. Another strength aspect of this website is the consistent of navigation menu which will guild learner through all the pages contained in this site.
There is an obvious weakness of this website is that the layout is not very clear. Same information is offered be different sections. For example, learners can download the lecture in PPT format form both the lecture archive and lecture schedule section which may cause learners to check both link and download twice. Another weakness is the file size is too big to download some times. All the lectures that can be both downloaded or viewed online, however, they are either too slow to download or to slow to watch online. I think the first, the download materials should me zipped and cut off several pieces before upload them. Second the video for online watch should be made into streaming format. Another suggestion is that combine the lecture archive and lecture list two sections together which will make the navigation more clearly. Also, it will be better if the designer can create a link only for learners to download the course materials for offline using. The same thing if composing another separate link for online viewing will make the layout of this website more clearly. The last thing I want to mention is that the font size is kind of big to users and looks uncomfortable. Especially, in the course materials section, font can be smaller and also make the page smaller. Do not need that much space between each topic. I do not think that is a good idea that using tables to display the contents. It will be matter if the designer can just all links right below each lecture titles.
Generally speaking, this is a good website that offers students enough information for this course. Multimedia technologies such as audio and video are also used in this websites. It contains all the important components for a course website. The consistent of navigation menu give users a clear and easy guideline and help them view through the whole site. This website will help the people who cannot attend the on-campus study and it also will benefit the students who have the difficulties with algebra studying. It is a good example of course web site.