Thursday, April 23, 2009

Design Critigue of edu 2.0

I checked this site out after Arl mentioned it one night and found it somewhat useful but not too exciting to look at. I haven't really had the opportunity to do much with it except sign up and check out the available resources. I still haven't created anything and submitted it to the site.

On Information: This site is designed for teachers and administrators to create simple learning management platforms. The reading level is appropriate for a college educated user. The graphics are minimal and limited to functional (as opposed to decorational) uses. It's not an overly detailed page...actually it's rather minimalist overall. There is a consistent cascading visual and textual style with each page...and with each page you add.

On Interactivity: Excellent orientation. Very easy and intuitive navigation with a simple tab interface a just a few icons for major functions. Information was easy to retrieve by search box or basic navigation. Great default help function that can be turned off when not needed.

On Screen Design: This is a very unnatractive design with awful color combinations of light blue and white with faded yellow tabs. Font is kind of greyish. As mentioned before, the layout is very simple and intuitive (albeit unnexciting) The resolution is good but the font is on the small side for older vision.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the review. BTW one can actually set up a school URL (subdomain) and customize some elements, e.g. banner, descriptive text and other images on the site.

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  2. I have no idea. I haven't tried anything with it yet, and to be honest, I don't think I will pursue edu 2.0 any further for now. the person to ask would be Arl. She's been working with it for awhile.

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  3. Hi there,

    This is Graham Glass, founder of edu2.0. Thanks for taking the time to visit the site. The default color scheme was designed to appeal to a wide variety of teachers/students that go to high school or college. Most of the users seem to like it. We're going to add four more color schemes soon that will give users a choice between a playful colorful scheme and a more subdued serious look.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "simple" learning management system. To the best of our knowledge, it has similar functionality to commercial systems such as Blackboard.

    Cheers,
    Graham

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  4. Wow...thanks for the reply Graham. My comment regarding "simple" LMS was in contrast to customizable options like building something in Joomla or drupal. From discussion I've had with teachers who are using it, Web 2.0 has many advantages over blackboard and moodle. I'm going to build something with your site over the summer and try it out with my classes next year. thanks for making this available for teachers.

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