Good Practice from Jonathan Plucker, IU Bloomington |
| Title | Providing Multiple Navigation Pathways for Online Resources |
| Course or Project | Creating a Web-based Resource on Intelligence to Support Learning and Instruction |
| Audience | experienced undergraduates |
| Active | 1998, still ongoing |
| Background Information | The field of human intelligence is fortunate to have both a rich, controversial history and a body of current research that is vibrant and equally controversial. The purpose of the site is to provide a dynamic, interactive resource for students who wish to explore this complex topic. |
| Teaching Challenge | Our challenge on this project was to create a Web-based learning resource that allows students to access the information in different ways. For example, a standard alphabetical index may be helpful to students with one particular learning style but not students who prefer visual organization and spatial navigation. |
| Good Practice | We constructed four navigation pathways: A visual map that shows the connections among the content on the site; an alphabetic index; a time period index, and a listing of Hot Topics in the study of human intelligence. We are adding an additional navigation tool in the near future that will figurally represent the site map, which will provide an additional, yet different, visual-spatial navigation pathway. |
| Impact | Students appear to use each of the four main navigation options, although some are consistently more popular than others. |
| Assessment | We collect detailed site visit statistics, which generally show the map to be the most popular navigation pathway, the Hot Topics index 2nd most popular, alphabetic index 3rd most popular, and the time period index the least popular pathway. We plan to conduct usability trials with undergraduates when the fifth navigation pathway is added. |
| Keywords | Presenting content, interactivity, allowing student choice |
| Technical Format | Customized Web site |
| Relevant URLs | http://www.indiana.edu/~intell |
Last updated:
4 May, 2007
Comments and
Questions | (317) 278-4833
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