THREE SUPER WBI WEBSITES EVALUATION I

Site: MITOCW – Seminar in Historical Methods

Subject: Approaches used by historians writing

URL: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-931Spring2004/CourseHome/index.htm

The MIT open course ware offers a series of courses online (over 1800 courses) and all these online courses are free. MITOCW is the first organization to post free courses online. This course named Seminar in Historical Methods is an online course offered in Spring, 2004. The course is designed to acquaint students with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the twentieth century. This course site is divided into seven parts: Course Home, Syllabus, Calendar, Readings, Lecture Notes, Assignments, Download this Course. The course home section introduce learners the description of this course. The syllabus is very simple and offering learners information about the assignments and grading details. In the calendar section, instructors are trying to make a schedule for learners. Reading section listed all the materials that need to be read for this course. Books information that need to be read in this class is introduced in the reading section and these books have made significant contributions to this field and have been selected to give as wide a coverage in both field and methodology. I think the greatest part is lecture note, because it provides learners video with audio format lecture which makes learners feel that they are in the real classrooms. The assignments examples in the assignment section is very helpful to the students who want to self evaluate their assignments. Furthermore, in order to give convenience to users, this course can be downloaded and viewed offline. As introduced in this site this course focus on the questions below: how historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytic discussion of their topic, and what are the advantages and drawbacks of their various approaches.
Clearly layout and navigation menu design are the reasons why I recommend this website as a super example of course website. This website has a very simple but clearly layout. Learners can find all the information they need from the seven sections as soon as they see the menu. The combination of background, header, foot design, color, font size and style give a viewers-friendly interface and greatly feeling. It can grasp the users’ attention at the first glance. The clear and reasonable layout designing includes a separate link for downloading the whole course which is an efficient consideration. All the lectures can be either downloaded to iPod or listen online through iTune media player. This offers learners more choices and makes learning more convenient and efficient. Furthermore, this website also offers lectures in video format which makes this web course almost perfect. And both the speed of the audios and videos downloading is very good.
To be honest, it is hard for me to find problems of the web design. In my own opinion, I prefer to add a little bit more graphics such as back ground, header or footer to make the page more active. I also think the instructor’s information is also needed. Overall this is a good website and interesting course.