Towards Developing a Framework to Analyze the Qualities of the University Websites

The website of a university is considered to be a virtual gateway to provide primary resources to its stakeholders. It can play an indispensable role in disseminating information about a university to a variety of audience at a time. Thus, the quality of an academic website requires special attention to fulfil the users’ need. This paper presents a multi-method approach of quality assessment of the academic websites, in the context of universities of Bangladesh. We developed an automated web-based tool that can evaluate any academic website based on three criteria, which are as follows: content of information, loading time and overall performance. Content of information contains many sub criteria, such as university vision and mission, faculty information, notice board and so on. This tool can also perform comparative analysis among several academic websites and generate a ranked list of these. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first initiative to develop an automated tool for accessing academic website quality in context of Bangladesh. Beside this, we have conducted a questionnaire-based statistical evaluation among several universities to obtain the respective users’ feedback about their academic websites. Then, a ranked list is generated based on the survey result that is almost similar to the ranked list got from the University ranking systems. This validates the effectiveness of our developed tool in accessing academic website.

Evaluating Usability of Academic Websites through a Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process

In the higher education sector, there is a growing trend to offer academic information to users through websites. Contemporarily, the users (i.e., students/teachers, parents, and administrative staff) greatly rely on these websites to perform various academic tasks, including admission, access to learning management systems (LMS), and links to other relevant resources. These users vary from each other in terms of their technological competence, objectives, and frequency of use. Therefore, academic websites should be designed considering different dimensions, so that everybody can be accommodated. Knowing the different dimensions with respect to the usability of academic websites is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach has been considered to be a significant method to deal with the uncertainty that is involved in subjective judgment. Although a wide range of usability factors for academic websites have already been identified, most of them are based on the judgment of experts who have never used these websites. This study identified important factors through a detailed literature review, classified them, and prioritized the most critical among them through the FAHP methodology, involving relevant users to propose a usability evaluation framework for academic websites. To validate the proposed framework, five websites of renowned higher educational institutes (HEIs) were evaluated and ranked according to the usability criteria. As the proposed framework was created methodically, the authors believe that it would be helpful for detecting real usability issues that currently exist in academic websites.

Effect of Information Architecture on the Usability of a University Website

A well-planned information architecture (IA) of a website can enhance the end users' efficiency, learnability, controllability and intention to revisit the site. Its significance is even more in the context of academic websites where the generation, management, and distribution of information are among the major activities. However, it remains a neglected issue as designers of academic websites have overlooked the important aspect of ‘intuitive user navigation' and focused primarily on its ‘look and feel.' Thus, the current study aims to analyze and compare the effectiveness of information architectural designs of some randomly selected university websites of Punjab (India) through a usability testing technique. For this purpose, the performance metric measured was the information seeking time. The usability session of each subject was captured through Camtasia Studio software. The findings of this study highlight the shortcomings of presently designed academic websites which adversely affect the usability of a website.

P018 INTERNET DIETS: ONLINE INFORMATION REGARDING NUTRITIONAL TREATMENTS FOR IBD

Background Nutrition is a vital component in the management of IBD and can be an effective primary therapy for many patients. Certain types of diets, including the Western diet, have been speculated to be associated with increased IBD risk or exacerbations. There are currently no specific dietary recommendations for IBD risk reduction. However, online resources may offer nutritional guidance to patients seeking information. This study evaluated specific nutritional and dietary treatment information for IBD on the Internet. Methods Google search engine was used to query “nutrition and inflammatory bowel disease” to obtain the first 100 websites. Websites that were non-accessible, duplicates, videos without transcripts, or evaluated animal models were excluded. Websites were categorized as informational or academic/professional. Websites were reviewed for discussion of specific nutritional treatments, acknowledgement of areas of uncertainty and references. Statistical analysis was performed using a two-tailed Fisher’s Exact Test with a significance value set at p <0.05. Results 89 (50 informational, 39 academic) met the inclusion criteria. No websites were commercial or personal. 49 (55%) websites discussed nutrition as a treatment modality. Enteral nutrition was discussed in 38 (77.6%), probiotics in 22 (44.9%), parenteral nutrition in 21 (42.9%), elimination diet in 19 (38.8%), and low FODMAP diet in 15 (30.6%). Academic resources discussed specific nutritional therapy more often than informational resources (82.1% and 45.0%, respectively; p=0.003) (Figure 1). Academic resources acknowledged areas of uncertainty more frequently than informational resources (64.1% and 30.0%, respectively; p=0.024). Academic resources cited references significantly more often than informational resources (80.9% and 10.6%, respectively; p<0.0001). Discussion This study shows that the most commonly discussed nutritional therapy was enteral feedings (77.6%), followed by probiotics (44.9%), parenteral feeding (42.9%), elimination diet (38.8%), and the low FODMAP diet (30.6%). Academic websites discussed dietary options significantly more than informational websites. These results suggest that there is a paucity in consumer-oriented literature regarding nutrition in IBD. Academic websites are the primary online resources for information about nutrition in IBD, discuss areas of uncertainty, and offer references. As patients with IBD are increasingly utilizing the Internet for recommendations regarding disease management, it is important that both academic and informational online IBD resources provide comprehensive nutritional information to enhance patient education. Reference