Janet Saman's ePortfolio
Communication Reflection
Artifact: SDSU Department of Educational Leadership website redesign from ED TEC 590
EDL Report
EDL Presentation
Project Description / Situation:
In 590, we were assigned to work with clients that wanted our assistance to evaluate a training need. My partner, Steve Corbett and I, worked with our client, Dr. George Cameron from the SDSU Department of Educational Leadership (EDL) to evaluate their website and recommend changes. We used a survey and benchmarking tools to conduct the evaluation. The benchmarking study consisted of 34 evaluation attributes in 5 categoriesusing a 5-point Likert scale. and evaluated by 3 different people. The 13-question survey was distributed via Survey Monkey and we received 58 responses. With all of this data, we needed to compile and summarize it into a report that would clearly communicate our recommendation to our client based on the results we gathered.
Outcome:
In our final report, we summarized the two separate data collection instruments, focusing on three primary themes – content, navigation and brand image. We broke down the results of the 34 evaluation attributes from the benchmarking study and provided best practices for each. To help provide a visual comparison, we used quite a few examples from “The Non-Designer’s Web Book” (Williams & Tollett, 2006) in our report to show the right and wrong way to design a website. We also created screen shots of the various errors and problems on the EDL site and showed them alongside screen shots from the websites we used for benchmarking. The screen references provided a picture of what the site could be if the properly designed.
Once we had a draft of the final report ready, we met with our client via Wimba and presented our findings. Although he was already aware of some of the issues with the EDL site, he seemed surprised that the recommendations indicated even more need for redesign than he first thought. He planned to suggest to the department that the time, effort and expense be spent to redesign the site.
Challenges:
The challenge for this project was the condensed timeframe we had for gathering the data, evaluating it, documenting it, meeting with the client to review the preliminary results and then presenting it in our final report with examples and visual references. One of the ways we met the challenge was to divide the tasks between us based on each of our respective strengths – Steve focusing on the benchmarking analysis and me focusing on the survey and the visuals.
Growth:
This project showed me that when you follow the Instructional Design model, you will have the documentation that the client needs to follow through with the project. We put a great deal of work into our evaluation and it was very satisfying to see that our client was genuinely excited to receive our recommendations. It was even more satisfying to know that many of our recommendations were carried out by another team of students when the EDL site redesign was part of our 795A course.
EDL Report
EDL Presentation
Project Description / Situation:
In 590, we were assigned to work with clients that wanted our assistance to evaluate a training need. My partner, Steve Corbett and I, worked with our client, Dr. George Cameron from the SDSU Department of Educational Leadership (EDL) to evaluate their website and recommend changes. We used a survey and benchmarking tools to conduct the evaluation. The benchmarking study consisted of 34 evaluation attributes in 5 categoriesusing a 5-point Likert scale. and evaluated by 3 different people. The 13-question survey was distributed via Survey Monkey and we received 58 responses. With all of this data, we needed to compile and summarize it into a report that would clearly communicate our recommendation to our client based on the results we gathered.
Outcome:
In our final report, we summarized the two separate data collection instruments, focusing on three primary themes – content, navigation and brand image. We broke down the results of the 34 evaluation attributes from the benchmarking study and provided best practices for each. To help provide a visual comparison, we used quite a few examples from “The Non-Designer’s Web Book” (Williams & Tollett, 2006) in our report to show the right and wrong way to design a website. We also created screen shots of the various errors and problems on the EDL site and showed them alongside screen shots from the websites we used for benchmarking. The screen references provided a picture of what the site could be if the properly designed.
Once we had a draft of the final report ready, we met with our client via Wimba and presented our findings. Although he was already aware of some of the issues with the EDL site, he seemed surprised that the recommendations indicated even more need for redesign than he first thought. He planned to suggest to the department that the time, effort and expense be spent to redesign the site.
Challenges:
The challenge for this project was the condensed timeframe we had for gathering the data, evaluating it, documenting it, meeting with the client to review the preliminary results and then presenting it in our final report with examples and visual references. One of the ways we met the challenge was to divide the tasks between us based on each of our respective strengths – Steve focusing on the benchmarking analysis and me focusing on the survey and the visuals.
Growth:
This project showed me that when you follow the Instructional Design model, you will have the documentation that the client needs to follow through with the project. We put a great deal of work into our evaluation and it was very satisfying to see that our client was genuinely excited to receive our recommendations. It was even more satisfying to know that many of our recommendations were carried out by another team of students when the EDL site redesign was part of our 795A course.
Copyright © 2010 by Janet L. Saman for the Department of Educational Technology at San Diego State University. All Rights Reserved.
