Forums → EcoEd DL workshop → Site feedback.

I've taken the liberty of copying my exchange with Teresa here. Obviously a huge drawback is the run-on formatting. That needs to be fixed.
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Thanks for increasing the font size!

One of my thoughts has to do with our discussion of branding--ESA being the premiere blah blah blah-which means a name change. EcoEd could be anybody--we want to tie this clearly to ESA. There was also talk of digital libraries being static; one speaker mentioned they'd changed DL to Distributed Learning. I don't have a better idea but if we're going to change the first part, we're free to change the whole thing. Although I know that will be hard for those who put their heart and soul into bringing EcoEd to this point.
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What I really like is the workshop subtitle: Translating Research for Undergraduate Education.
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So any name change should come first, before going live.
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I'll have to go back and look at the forum [here I am!]. As long as it's primarily the workshop participants, that's fine. But a larger group means more explaining.
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"Ever energetic"? Hah! You wore me out. But it was fun, and a wonderful group.
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Julie
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p.s. one obvious way to link it to ESA is the URL: esa.org. But that is slooow. Plantpop@esa absolutely crawls.
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On Mar 25, 2010, at 10:03 PM, Teresa Mourad wrote:
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Thanks Julie.<br><br>
It is really gratifying to know that you want to keep the conversation going. From the palpable level of energy in the workshop, I know there are others who would also like to continue to exchange ideas or to stay informed. I have some suggestions but first let me give you some updates.
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A. Immediate future
1. Towards a Public launch of EcoEd DL (Beta) on the CWIS platform
The planning team for EcoEd DL had a meeting today. We really came away brimming with ideas. We have decided that in the immediate future, we will push to launch the beta site of EcoEd DL – the CWIS system that you have been the first to preview! Permit us to check on the links on ESA’s site, make sure the connection with the BEN portal and NSDL is active and prepare the announcement.
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2. Continue to Invite Submissions – Work with ESA Sections and Scientific Networks
While we create a kind of master plan for the project, we intend to continue accepting submissions of resources. To begin, we hope to be able to work closely with selected ESA sections, like Plant Population (represented by the ever energetic Julie Mulroy), Applied Ecology (represented by Hal Balbach), and the Student Section (represented by Aurora MacRae-Crerar), and perhaps, also with the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section (represented by Jesse Ford). We hope also that NESCent (represented by Jory Winthrop) will work with us to engage evolutionary ecologists. We warmly welcome your submissions as well, particularly from our teaching faculty in the workshop who more than likely have some field exercise or lab or classroom activity to share. Please do consider doing so.
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3. Building Community in the new EcoEd
As you know, the new system already comes with several interactive features that allow users to comment on any individual resource. It is also possible for any user to suggest ways in which the resource can be extended or adapted – all through the Comment feature. Several of you have also participated in the Forum. In the coming months, we will look into forming a cadre of visionary thought leaders who can galvanize discussion online on specific topics that may be of interest to the community. So if you are interested in being part of this visionary thought leadership, please let me know!
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B. Continuing the Conversation
So in the spirit of building an online learning community, my response to Julie’s interest is this: that we all take the conversation into EcoEd DL (beta) forum. We hope that the Site Feedback forum there can continue to be a place of ideas from the community. And Julie, I see you have already visited! That would be my first preference - to allow the idea of an online learning community to take root and to invite others to join in this conversation as well. You may get a reminder occasionally to add or check out new comments there.
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I also take this opportunity to inform everyone that there is a general Education listserv where you can receive information and announcements related to education. There are currently about 400-500 on that listserv. Anyone can post on that listserv. So if you are interested, I am happy to have you added to that listserv. It is currently named the EcoEd listserv. Historically it is not directly related to the EcoEd DL. My thought is to provide periodic updates etc through this listserv and other ESA channels to channel greater participation within EcoEd DL.
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Again, thank you all for your incredible support and energy! Let me know what you think.
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Teresa
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Teresa Mourad<br>
Director, Education & Diversity Programs<br>
Ecological Society of America<br>
http://www.esa.org/education_diversity/

<br><br><small>This message edited by admin on June 10, 2010 at 2:53 pm</small>

I can't find the last two messages I posted. Fortunately they were short.<br><br>

Until the run-on format and tiny font of posted messages gets fixed, I'm going to go back to e-mail. I do think having the messages in the forum is a good idea; I'll cut and paste the e-mails into the forum once the posting problem is fixed.

Thanks,

Julie

Julie

<br><br><small>This message edited by admin on June 10, 2010 at 2:51 pm</small>

The EcoEd DL workshop - March 18-21 at AAAS was amazing! Please continue to give your feedback about this site here. We value your ideas.

I keep having additional thoughts from our discussion. Is it possible to set up a discussion list for participants?

NOTE: I had all of the following comments as individual points, but there doesn't seem to be any control over formatting of posts in this forum, so they all run together as one huge paragraph. Sorry about that! .....Overall, I think this is a great collection of resources. I think there are some things that could be done to make it a bit more user-friendly. Following are some comments I had as I worked through the scavenger hunt...I hope they are helpful!

For me, it took at least 15-20 min. of clicking around to get a really thorough sense of how it was organized. (See my comment about "Core Concept" versus "Classification" for a specific example of this.) I think that most instructors/teachers want something to be as intuitive and accessible as possible, because they are always so pressed for time. If someone goes to this DL and doesn’t “get it” right away, you’re likely to lose them. And, my sense is that people will give a new site one chance, and if they aren’t hooked on the first visit they likelihood of them going back a second time is really low. This seems to be true for K-12 teachers, in particular, although it appears from the criteria on the search page that your target audience for this DL is undergrad instructors/students.



It is not immediately, intuitively obvious how it is arranged. For example, what is the difference between browsing by “Core Concept” and “Classification”. It seemed to default to “Core Concept”, but it might be helpful to have some notes on the front page which explain what the difference is, and why you would choose one over the other.



I would like to see some sort of welcome message which provides a very brief overview of how things are arranged, how best to use the resources, where to start, etc. Maybe have it divided into “Welcome, Instructors” and “Welcome, Students” (if students are even one of your target audiences for this DL, which isn’t clear to me), with messages customized for the different potential audiences.



A link to a FAQ might be helpful, as well.

It is a bit frustrating how different the resource types can be (e.g., one is a lengthy module, lecture or activity, one is a link to an external website, one is a pdf, one is simply a photograph), and yet there is nothing to indicate this on first glance so you have to click the link for each record/resource type to find out what it is. Maybe you could have a simple icon or even text that lets the user know what sort of resource it is before they open the specific record.

Related to the previous comment, I was a bit confused/disappointed by the fact that some records appeared to be nothing more than a one- or two-sentence description of a concept or activity. A specific example is “NCEP Exercise- Scientific Writing: Preparing An Abstract” (http://www.esa.org/ecoed/SPT--FullRecord.php?ResourceId=144). I expected a detailed description/protocol for conducting this exercise with students, maybe a discussion of how it works, potential pitfalls, tips for making it work more effectively, etc. I viewed the record and searched for some sort of associated file, only to learn that it was basically this: “In this exercise students are assigned a scientific paper to read. Students must then write their own abstract for the assigned paper.” It’s not that it is not an interesting idea for an activity, but for all the work and searching and clicking required to get there, I would expect more.

It’s not immediately obvious why some records have a “>” preceding them. I assume it is because they are either recommended or new, but it would be nice if that were made more clear.

The “Search” function works pretty well, and I really like the option of being able to set up email notification when new resources are added. However, having to click on “Refine your search” in order to save the search or set up email notifications is not intuitive.

This is trivial, but I found it a bit unusual that in the discussion forums (fora?) it lists the newest messages at the top. It seems like most discussion forums I see add more recent messages at the bottom, so that if a threaded discussion is going on you can follow it by scrolling down, which is more intuitive than scrolling up.




<br><br><small>This message edited by Jory on March 18, 2010 at 9:34 am</small>

The image resolution in the pdf files that I looked up seems to be extremely low - maybe 96 dpi or lower. Can the files be re-converted to pdf format but with higher resolution?

It will be nice if images can be shown as thumbnails in search results

I viewed an interesting item, but forgot to post a rating. Later, I could not locate it again. It would be good if a user had some way to look back and see where they had been previously. The History setting on the browser does not track the internal locations, just the main page.

I find the site interesting, but a little hard to navigate. I kept getting logged out accidentally when moving around, so then I could not view the full item and comment.

My first time looking at Advanced Search, I didn't recognize the "Show Limits" section as a clickable link. I didn't find it until I was running through the scavenger hunt tasks.

An observation about the forum "Post Message" page:

This text area for entering posts is really tiny!

<br><br><small>This message edited by pauleallen on March 17, 2010 at 12:48 pm</small>

I really appreciated the "Get Recommendation" option.

Instead of just bookmarking your favorite resource, would it be possible to have your own "favorites" pages attached to your account, so you could have a list of your favorites on the website everytime you logged in under your account?

sometimes the system would not let me use the back button, or I had to press it many times to get back to my orginal search results-- is it possible to have a link at the bottom of the page that says "back to search results" and will take you there without having to use the back button.

it would be nice to have links to the relevant primary literature (or the abstracts) associated with the photographs.

<br><br><small>This message edited by Aurora on March 17, 2010 at 7:14 am</small>

For formatting purposes, I think that the Advanced Search key needs to be more center and more pronounced, easy to overlook.

It would be very useful to be able to easily limit resources by being able to narrow the search to resource type (e.g. photograph, lab activity...) and then to be able to go to the subject (or vice versa).

The account management is good.

Following the instructions, I could not find

* "limit results of keyword search for water to resources in the Drought & Water-Ecosystem Services Special Collection" - how?

* "Refine Search" - do you mean "Recent Searches"?

* "Save the search" - How?

The Message Posting needs a way to insert linebreaks.

<br><br><small>This message edited by korte on March 10, 2010 at 6:39 am</small>

I seemed to have had some issues searching in general both in the keyword and advanced search modes. For example, I was curious about lab exercises, but when I search by keyword for things like 'laboratory activity' or simply 'laboratory' I only got about 14 hits, but if I click on the 'laboratory activity' link when already in a record, the link leads me to 51 hits.
I think it might also be useful that there was a creation date indicated somewhere in the full record, there is a release date, but not a creation date of the resource, I could see this being useful if you are looking for a review of something.
Also, when browsing it might be nice to see the what type of object the record is before clicking on the full record (especially photos) I found it frustrating if I was search for something and then clicking through several layers of something to end up a photo when I was looking for a document and vice versa.
Finally I couldn't get a handle on the number of records listed next to categories. For example, next to the science of ecology category in the main 'browse resources' menu the number 129 was written. I thought this meant there were 129 resources, but when I got to the link there were only 82, I'm guessing I must be missing something.
Some really interesting stuff though and I could see myself utilizing this type of resource, especially to look for field activities.

Browse resources -

It would be nice to feature some content on the top page (e.g., most popular, most recently added).
I realize that browse is different than search but I tried to enter text into the empty green box.
Consider listing the sub-classifications on the top page.
You mentioned other browse classifications will be implemented. Will they include taxonomic names? resource types? Basically any structured meta-data that you have in your records? I really like the information provided in the browse mode at OERCommons . I like that you can quickly see the numbers of resources available based on a variety of categories one might be interested in.

Home Page -

Can you get Advance Search up in the search box.
It would be nice to have some images (thumbnails) of content - very text heavy at this point.

Search -
It looks like the basic search is limited to keywords. I would consider broadening it to include a few more fields. It is relatively easy for users to scan a list of titles (or add limits to the search if they get too many hits) but getting too few hits is discouraging.

Search Results -

I like the snippets of content to help you decide if the hit is what you are interested in.
I have seen search results that tell you where the search term was found (e.g., "succession" was found in the abstract of this record) or show the context of the search term (a la google).
I agree with Chris - I want a direct link to the content from the results page. It look like only links off site are available from search results.
Thumbnails of results would be great - or at least icons letting me know what the resources type and format are.
Need to make title link to either the full record or the resource itself. I see that this works for links off the site.

Get Recommendations -

I like the idea of this but I'm not sure that I would make it so front and center given that most users will not be able to take advantage of it as it is implemented. You could default it to highest rated or most often viewed records if the person is not logged in or doesn't have enough info to get recs.

Forums -

How to tie discussions in will be an interesting challenge. I'm a big fan of trying to build more "teacher talk" around materials so that folks get exposed to each others ideas about implementation and their is more context around the different ways that these resources can be used.

This message edited by sdonovan on February 22, 2010 at 5:50 pm

This message was edited by mcmilla on August 14, 2012 at 3:29 pm.

Sorry about the flat text but that is all that seems to be supported. I tried HTML tags but no go.

1. If you browse on Classifications and choose Drought and Water Ecosystem services collection, there are multiple entries for the same item.

2. I would remove Date of Record Release from the metadata display. This isn't relevant to the average user.

3. Add the author names to the metadata displayed. If we want people to contribute, we need to acknowledge them. Having the author affiliation is less relevant.

4. The Rights field really doesn't need to be in the drop down for the advanced search.

5. The Rights field really isn't useful as described. For example, I don't know what the ESA copyright statement says.

6. For many records, when there is an associated file (generally at pdf), it would be nice if there were a link to the file off of the browse display rather than having to go to the full record.

7. You can save your searches, but it would be nice to be able to save or bookmark certain resources within the library.

If you have any suggestions on how we should customize the site, this is the place to share them.

This message edited by riemjg on February 21, 2010 at 3:31 pm

This message was edited by mcmilla on August 14, 2012 at 3:28 pm.