This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Talk to the people who use your website
We learned that students wanted to 'shop' for classes on Stellar through some advisory group meetings and through the support logs. So the development team got the mandate to find a way to make it easier to shop for classes. There some early ideas being shopped around. We could make the syllabus, the first assignment world readable for the first couple weeks of the semester, for example.
Jean Foster arranged interviews with a couple of the students who had asked us to make shopping easier. She asked them an open question: "How do you shop for classes now?" And what we found was that they were looking for classes much earlier than we'd expected, and they are of course looking at the class as it was taught in earlier semesters.
See, we'd been focussed on how to help students look at the class in the semester they will take it. But they know materials aren't in place early enough (something we'd worried about too) so they already tend to look at archived courses.
Suddenly we have all sorts of new options. We can look at how to open access to archived courses. Even better, we can find ways to link our content to Open Course Ware. OCW is basically an archive of classes, and they've got about 1100 in place now. So there's a pretty good chance that we can point people shopping for a particular course over to OCW. If an archived course is limited access, and most of them are, we can dynamically generate a link to the appropriate OCW class.
I'm not sure what we'll end up doing, but talking to the students has opened up some more elegant solutions. Imagine if we'd developed a nice new technique to look at what little material is available for new classes, only to find after launching that the students weren't looking there. Interviewing users is such an obvious and easy thing to do - but it's amazing how often it doesn't happen.