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Information Design—Week 5, Assignment 2

…critique Information Design on the AiO online Classroom and write at least one page considering these issues:

• Navigation and interface design
• User centered design (from the viewpoint of the user - you, in this case)
• Use of interactive media for educational purposes in terms of rich media
• What type of learning styles is used here
• Identify the Global and local navigation
• Where are the features located

Navigation and interface design

Although the classroom interface took a while to get used to, it’s organization does make sense to me. Listing weekly assignments and course lectures in one, consistent location from page to page makes it easy to know where to look for that information.

It would be convenient for users and less interruptive if there were other ways to move linearly from page to page—in-page links to the next and previous pages in a lecture, for instance.

Being enrolled in a course in AIO’s Interactive Media Design baccalaureate program, I was surprised and disappointed to see that the very classroom environment in which I am learning Web design best practices does not adhere to the generally accepted recommendations of the W3C. The classroom environment’s underlying HTML and Javascript code doesn’t even come close to validating. ( http://validator.w3.org/ )

The discussion questions’ navigation is awkward. I don’t like drop-down menus for navigational purposes; they should be used only for selecting a value when filling out a form. Moving from one discussion question page to the next should be as easy as clicking a link. The questions themselves should be displayed in the assignment outline at the top of the page; a user shouldn’t have to visit each question’s individual page to find out what the question is.

I like the threaded-discussion concept, but it is poorly implemented here. Expanding and collapsing each post is terribly tedious; that you can expand all posts at the top of the page is the only redeeming functionality, but it is pointless to have. That particular “feature” should go away—or at the very least default to expanded—as it interferes with use of the classroom.

Also, a full-text search on the comments and/or lectures/lessons would be a great addition to the environment. Often, I’ve needed to recall another student’s comment, but couldn’t remember which lesson or assignment it was on. In the case of the discussion questions, it was particularly troublesome to find them because of the awkward navigation between them.

Use(s) of interactive media

I like the timelines and helpful graphics offered in the lecture, but this is nothing that can’t be done in a book. Occasionally, there is an interactive presentation which requires feedback from the user—inline quizzes or interesting presentations—which greatly add emphasis to the subject matter in a new and different way. These are good.

In my opinion, associating a face to the information I’m learning would be helpful; AIO should be utilizing video-recorded lectures. This would be a more full use of the interactive multimedia available on the Web.

I would appreciate more links to other good online resources within the lectures and lessons. It would be helpful if AIO would utilize some of the new link-sharing services available, such as http://del.icio.us , to share the links associated to a subject matter with their students.

While I’m on that subject of bookmarks… a method of internal bookmarking would be a handy, interactive alternative to note-taking. Image this: while reading a lecture online, a student reads a couple sentences which succinctly summarize the material. He wants to remember this information. Instead of copying and pasting these lines into a word processor as notes, why shouldn’t he be able to highlight the passage on the page, then click a button in a site-wide toolbar that sends the excerpted text, along with the lecture title, which page it was on, and other metadata, to a list of his in-course bookmarks? These could then be sorted by the time they were bookmarked, their location, alphabetically, or a number of other schemes that would help him to find the information he has saved in an efficient manner.

Learning/teaching styles

The AIO classroom utilizes mostly visual means of teaching. On occasion, there have been audio samples available, but they are few. Kinesthetic learners are, for now, out of luck in an online classroom environment, because their just isn’t currently a way to physically involve students with virtual topics in a virtual environment.

Identify global, local navigation and their locations

The global navigation is on top: Gradebook, Email, Chat, etcetera. The local navigation, which changes from course to course, depending on the material, is on the left in a hierarchical, collapsible list. Further, there are two more global navigation items at the bottom of every page for exiting a course or logging out of the system. These could be considered courtesy navigation items except that they don’t appear anywhere else in the UI.

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