My talk at the Rice HCI group
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Submitted by
manpreet.
on 2006-03-24 16:37.
I presented Cnx.org and my plans for usability going forward to the Human Factors/Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group at Rice. This is their feedback.
Background: The Rice HCI group is a group of professors and graduate
students from the Psychology department at Rice and UH Clear Lake. The
hold regular talks (http://psych.rice.edu/hci_hf_schedule/ ) and
invited me to talk about Connexions so we could identify any possible
areas of collaboration.Here are some things that I were mentioned:
- Documentation exists from previous usability work done by David Lane and his students. They will find it for us and hand it off. It might be outdated but it will help to see what task flows they had created and I might be able to update them.
- Is there any opposition to using freely available non-open-source
products if they work well and increase the usability of the site?
- Lack of formal needs analysis for all the user roles
- A question that came up again and again - what is in it for instructors? Sine there are no course management tools, instructors would have to do double the work to create the course in Connexions and then again in the course management application that they will use to actually do quizzes, grades etc.
- Authorship issues - it isn't clear to people how the authorship issues work when their content is used by other people.
- Search/Browse for content is unsatisfactory. For learners there is no way to know which module is best for their needs e.g. there might be 10 basic statistics modules - which one should they use?
- Lack of Subject area/discipline/field tags
- Lack of difficulty level/pre-requisites kind of information. Is a Calculus module for high school students or graduate students?
- powerpoint and other doc type importers
- Basic graphic design and contrast issues
- Why call it a "course" when there isn't any course management?
- Rice is moving to an open source course management system - we should take a look at that
- Most authors don't want to learn XML - someone mentioned Keynote (I think) as having the ability to just take in any format and the author is never exposed to the backend XML
- Has any weblog analysis been done?
- Talk to people who sign up and never author - why that behavior?
Re: My talk at the Rice HCI group
Posted by
jenn
at
2006-03-29 12:01
Nice stuff, though a little scary in spots! Yes, we've addressed a lot of those issues, though apparently not recently with the HCI folks. Should we respond here, or would that be likely to overload the SimpleBlog interface with all the discussion it would engender? :)
Re: Re: My talk at the Rice HCI group
Posted by
manpreet
at
2006-04-04 11:48
We should discuss it here - if it looks like it is overloading the blog, we can always take it offline.
