Features of Educational Websites - Essay Example

COMPUTER PROJECT This paper presents a clear picture of some of the features of certain educational websites that offer different educational courses. More emphasis was put on features provided by these institutional websites that claim to be responsible for their deeds. The main agenda of these institutional website organizations are to provide educational courses to different levels of students i.e. undergraduate, graduate and so on. Let's look at some of the features of the selected (three) websites. www.moodle.org Moodle.org claims to provide a course management system. It provides open source software package. Moodle.org provides free software, community discussion boards and information regarding the courses provided by the websites. Moodle has a sister website called www.moodle.com which is mostly used for commercial purposes and to provide other services that are necessary for the development of the organization. Moodle provides a software package that helps the teachers or educators to make learning look easy. The emphasis is more on creating right environment for the educators to understand the nuances of teaching. Moodle claims the software package helps the educators to master in creative teaching and create effective online learning communities. The home page of Moodle is user friendly. The layout structure is not bad and browsing the website is not that difficult. On the left pane of the website all the services provided by the organization can be seen and can be navigated easily. The Moodle's publish yearly newsletter that helps users who are new to the website and provides much needed information about the activities and achievements of the website. The middle pane presents briefly what the website is providing to the users. Some of the information is highlighted and when anyone clicks on the highlighted image the user will be taken to the next page related to the topic he/she clicked. One of the important features of the website is users can navigate by selecting the preferred language. The website provides community discussions in English and several other languages such as Spanish, French, German, etc. From the standpoint, overall the site gives an average look. It's not attractive and does not have any special features to pull the traffic. Though it claims to be OSI certified, who knows OSI is. Nowadays websites are certified by some organizations that no one knows. Other important aspect is the information is not well organized. It looks as if all the stuff has been put together. They should have given space to put the information at right places. www.atutor.ca ATutor copyrights are reserved by Adaptive Technology Resource Center or in short ATRC. It is an open source web based Learning Content Management System or in short LCMS. It helps tutors by providing the necessary the tools to develop the presentation style. Installing the software package can be done in minutes and the LCMS has been designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind so that when students navigate through the module can understand the topic easily. One of the important features of this software package provided by ATutor is it can be updated easily. To give Atutor a new look custom templates can be developed with ease. With ATutor quick assembling, packaging, distribution and redistribution of Web-based instructional content, retrieving, importing prepackaged content and conducting online courses is made easy. Since the whole teaching method is based on graphical user interface system and web based applications browsing the website is easier. In general when a student misses a class, he has to get the information by borrowing fellow student's notes. But with ATutor even if the student misses the class he can come to the website at any time and can view information required just like in real time environment. Thus saving the much-needed time. Overall the site is good and provides the required features for the educators and tutors. The homepage layout structure is attractive and the information is not congested. Enough room has been given to put the information at right places and thus making the browsing of the website less hectic. www.edutools.info Western Cooperative for Educational telecommunications or in short WCET sponsors Edutools. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and WCALO are some of the other sponsors. It provides consulting services to make or assist in decision-making, reviews and side-by-side comparisons in e-learning community. It provides Course Management Systems (CMS), Online Course Evaluation Project (OCEP) and Projects. Reviews on CMS products that are used in higher education and in many of the K-12 virtual schools are compared and conclusions are decision-making takes place to improve the product. Monterey Institute of Technology and Education compares the reviews of online college, advancement placement and high school courses. Different links are given to navigate the website. If the user clicks the CMS he/she is taken to the next page. Descriptions on CMS and OCEP are good and catchy. They accept suggestions and claims to look into them. Overall the website is average. The layout structure and everything is good but when we try to navigate some pages they are not found in the website for example when hit the project link we won't find the page. Another important thing is it doesn't provide any search tool. Discussion Forums After the Internet boom in the mid 90's and early 2000 so many websites were registered that it became difficult for an average user to decide which one is the legitimate one. It was a gold rush for the Internet space providers. The Internet business flourished like real estate business. In most of the websites different sponsors advertise their websites and claim that they provide legitimate work and pay as per the work. But is has been found that 98 percent of these websites are fraudulent, misguides and cheats the customers. To discuss and overcome these problems customers often visits the discussions forums and message boards. The writer also passed through one of these scam sites. But the claims of these websites were too true to be believed the writer posted a message regarding the legitimacy of the website in discussion forums and message boards. Most of the discussion forums and message boards allow users to comment on and about anything. It can be refuted or supported by any other user. No one can rely on a little number of responses about their queries. Question should be posted to different groups of the forum or the message board. And the average of the negative and positive responses should be taken and should come to the conclusion. No quick decisions should be taken on this matter because at the end it will have devastating results like losing up your money that you have invested in one of the fake websites. You should check the responses of your queries on these message boards. The groups in these message boards might give false implications. So an average of these responses should be taken. Making of your own group helps you much better. If any one in the group comes across something he/she will share with the group and thus benefiting everyone in the group. As you share your thoughts and give suggestions to other members of the group, each member will trust you more often and respects your opinion. As the writer said he came across a scam site, first it looked like a legitimate website. But when the writer visited the discussion forums and message boards, to his astonishment he found the website to be fraudulent. Most of the members were of the same opinion and strongly advised not to invest anything in that website. Some of the member aid that they were scammed by the same website and asked me to join their discussion group to collectively fight against the scammers. Finally I decided to give a call to the website's admin. When I called the given number in their website, I found the number to be of one of the residents and he said was getting these calls from long time. Thus before going to conclusions visit message boards and read the responses from the other members and act accordingly. Reference ATRC. (2005) Learning Content Management System. [online]. Available from: . [Accessed April 15 2006]. WCET. (2006) Welcome to the future of EduTools. [online]. Available from: . [Accessed April 15 2006]. Moodle. (2006) Welcome to Moodle. [online]. Available from: . [Accessed April 15 2006]. Read More