Sakai Usability
My Sakai course pages passed the World Wide Web Consortium's WAI checklist and the Section 508 checklist for Web accessibility. Throughout the course, students have their choice of learning from textual, graphical, or video representations of course content. The course instructor is constantly making new videos when students request "show-me" movies to provide instruction in alternate representations. All of the course content is available through collapsible menus created with Dreamweaver and the Adobe "Spry" Ajax framework. Through Dreamweaver templates, the course pages have a common look and feel. By linking the templates to the School of Education's cascading style sheet, the course pages have the same branding used at the School's Web site.
Because usability is extremely important, we have used the Sakai testing tool to administer a survey asking the students if they have had any trouble navigating the site. The following responses are typical of the feedback we received:
- "MyCoursesPlus [i.e., Sakai] in my view is 10 times better than mycourses [i.e., WebCT]. It is more up to date with times and has many more features that were not present in MyCourses."
- "I am very pleased with the new structure for this course. The site is very organized and easy to navigate."
- "This new course management system is very similar to Serf. It is easy to navigate, fun to use, and has a lot of various options for the student to use."
