Curriculum and Instruction Department Consultation Report

Curriculum & Instruction Consultation Report

The Curriculum and Instruction department is a part of the State University of New York at Oswego’s School of Education. The department specializes in preparing teachers in Childhood, Adolescence and TESOL Education. They aim to prepare incoming teachers to work in the schooling system throughout New York State. This was a collaborated project between myself and two other team members. Our client approached us with concerns that their students and faculty are not visiting their website. They came to us for recommendations on the information architecture, accessibility, usability, and functionality of their site. It was also important to them to increase a sense of identity within the department. We created a consultation report based on our suggestions and recommendations for the client.

Project Goal:

To identify problems and items that need to be improved upon the Curriculum and Instruction department website. In order to increase usability, accessibility, readability, legibility, sense of identity, organization and overall increase use of the website.

Audience:

The intended primary audience consists of SUNY Oswego faculty, staff, students, and incoming students. The report relates to each audience group by offering group specific information and how each audience member would benefit from changes to the Curriculum and Instruction department website.

Content Audit:

We completed a content audit to access the current information on the website. We found there was a lot of information that was critical, but didn’t stand out on the site as important because there was no information hierarchy established. There was also information that was lengthy and overwhelming to users of the site. Information was placed on inappropriate pages and often the same information was placed on multiple pages on the website. As a team we suggested stating information in a more clear and concise manner. Repeating information is unnecessary and can be confusing to users. We recommended updating the information to make sure it was all accurate and correctly represented the department.

Competitive Analysis:

In order to gain a better understanding of what information is necessary on the website, we researched other education departments at different colleges. We looked at Nazareth, Cortland, and Geneseo. Looking at their websites helped us learn how their departments organize their information and what was working successfully. Their websites incorporated a lot of imagery of students teaching other children. Using personal imagery helped create an increased sense of identity in their departments. Also, most of the information was in bullet form and summarized to be easy to scan for users. This is really helpful because when websites are content heavy, people tend to glide over the information and only search for specific content. However, when content is organzied to be concise people are much more likely to read all the information. This analysis helped us as a team find better ways to organize the content and create a better sense of identity for the department of Curriculum and Instruction at Oswego.

User Surveys:

Based on the competitive analysis, we conducted surveys to help us understand the goals and needs of the users who visit the website. The results of the surveys helped us access what information needs to be on the website and how to make the site appeal to the target audience. The results displayed that the website gets little activity and that the target audience isn’t using it as the department would hope. Many students and faculty expressed that they rarely use the website and that when they do they are often confused on how to navigate through it. It was also mentioned that many people didn’t realize they were part of the department which displays a large lack of identity. The User surveys were really useful in helping us give recommendations on how to improve the website for future use.

Reccomendations & Suggestions:

Our main reccomendations were to create an improved sense of identity by including imagery and videos of students teaching in the classroom. We felt including imagery would better help new students identify with the program and give them an excitment to teach. We also reccomended including quotes from teachers and students in the program to create a feeling of being connected to the department. We also suggested reducing the content to be written in a bullet format. Using bullets would help summarize the information so that students don’t feel lost when using their website. Also, we suggested adding more headings and subheadings to improve the organization of the website and it would also create a sense of hierarchy which would make the website easier to navigate through.

When the report was given to the client, they were very appreciative and motivated to make the reccomened changes to their current website to better suit their department in the future. The report was later given to the Chief Technology Officer at SUNY Oswego and the report was then used to address similar concerns on the college’s website.