Organization
Sunflower Western University offers an online Masters degree in Instructional Design and Human Performance Improvement. The Sunflower Western University offers many other degrees in different departments, and has a specific website for each department that has to abide by a specific template and visual style guide. The Instructional Design and Human Performance Improvement department offers certificates and opportunities to participate in learning labs in addition to the Masters degree.
The evaluation performed was a formative evaluation assessing the quality of the information the website provided to its users, prospective and current students, and the website’s usability.
Stakeholders
The evaluation was sponsored by the department chair, Jo Young. Additionally, this analysis had three types of stakeholders for the evaluation: Upstream stakeholders that were committed to the designing content and maintaining the website, direct Impactees who used the website, and Indirect Impactees which were others tied to the University as a whole.
Process
In our evaluation, we followed Chyung’s 10 step evaluation process. This involved three phases and ten steps that addressed feasibility, ethics, risks, and feasibility. The steps can be found in table 2.
Dimensions
Based on client feedback, two dimensions were chosen to be analyzed and importance weighting (IW) was assigned to each dimension. The two dimensions were:
Quality of information: How well does the website present information for current and prospective students and support the program advisor for her advising? What needs to be changed to provide sufficient information to the stakeholders? Weight: Very Important.
Usability: How intuitive is the website navigation? What needs to be changed to improve usability? Weight: Important.
Data Collection Methods
Our evaluation used multiple sources of data, including the department chair, marketing advisor, and web designer, as well as current students. We also collected data from individuals with no association to the program who have never seen the website before in order to gather accurate first impressions of the provided information and user experience.
Additionally, we used multiple types of data collection methods:
· Surveys—Web-based survey questionnaires were administered.
· Interviews—Semi-structured zoom interviews were conducted.
· Extant data reviews— Website analytics
· Observations—Web conferencing of first time users were observed.
Results
Using a three tiered rubric (Superior, Met Expectations, and Did Not Meet Expectations) to organize the data collected, we found that our first dimension met expectations and our second dimension did not meet the expectations of our evaluation.
References
Chyung, S. Y. (2019). 10-step evaluation for training and performance improvement. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
*Note: Synonyms were used in place of client and participants