November 14, 2007
Adult Learners Find Some College Web Sites Wanting
Before they choose to enroll in continuing-education courses, adult learners spend plenty of time perusing college Web sites, looking for the right fit. But those prospective students don’t always like what they see, says a report from Eduventures.
The college consulting firm surveyed more than 500 adults who were considering taking classes. Most said the sites they visited were at least somewhat helpful, but many said the college sites were difficult to search or skimpy on useful content.
For example, more than nine out of 10 prospective students visited continuing-education Web sites to figure out how much courses will cost, the study found. But only 59 percent said the sites spelled out pricing plans clearly and comprehensively. Colleges that do make that information easily accessible, it would seem, are getting a leg up on their competition. —Brock Read
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Continuing Education’s studnets are busy, want information in easy to understand formats, and within 3 clicks.
Traditional and non-traditional studnets are web savy and have high expectations.
If they are judging us by a website, and many are, we need to invest in an effective tool.
— Michele Davis Nov 15, 01:05 PM #
I regularly look at college websites and I can’t agree with CE students more – while there are some wonderful sites, many simply do not provide information in a user friendly manner – often requiring many multiple clicks to find information. And the logic employed in building the pathways to specific pieces of information is seldom very clear to an outsider. Altogether too much space is wasted on posting upcoming events on the main page – information that current students probably already know and information that distance or CE students couldn’t care less about. As marketing tools, many college websites SUCK!
— TDD Nov 15, 02:19 PM #
I dropped a course this summer that used Blackboard at UCF. I use Moodle in my own courses. I found the layout labyrinthe and difficult to follow. There was a “feature” called compile that promised to export text files for offline reading. I tried it with a section, took the test and failed, discovering later that the export was miserably incomplete. Ouch! The student journals couldn’t be edited and the online discussions were threaded by author so contributions by others were not acknowledged other than being counted, encouraging multiple vapid comments.
The first time I took someone else’s online course, it was full of silly .doc formatted text that was originally formatted for handouts and pasted in. Please folks, save stuff as .txt or .rtf! Do you honestly embed advanced features that require .doc? Can you say humbug?
What about the fake online courses that are nothing but a list of reading? That sort of thing must deserve some kind of comment but . . .
Finally, the comment about CE students having little time may not be precisely true. Many CE courses are total fluff that don’t build knowledge or skills but require a certain number of hours to be expended on reading stuff any competent professional will have read long ago. yawn
Correction. Long, long ago.
— Bob Calder Nov 15, 08:59 PM #