Evaluating Sites

How can you tell if a web site is any good? What do you mean by "any good"? There is no shortage of articles and methodologies for evaluating web sites (see the references). We would be adding to the surplus by introducing our own! Rather than introducing another value-laden rating scheme, we think it is more important that you develop your own strategies, based upon your own goals.

Who Knows Value?
Most of the evaluation references we recommend come from the work of Librarians. This is no big surprise, as it has been the long respect roles of professional librarians to judge the quality of information and its relationship to other works in the same field.
Machines and computers are pretty poor at this task! One of the most popularly used web sites, Yahoo!, has behind the scenes an army of human experts that review, categorize, and analyze the millions of links from their site. Although we are extremely fond of the Ask Jeeves search site because you can enter queries as normal questions, you get rather poor (or humorous) results if you ask "What is the meaning of human existence?" or "Is it moral to kill one if it will save many?"

When we are saying "evaluate" we are not talking about cosmetic appearances, flashy gizmos, numbers of stars, etc. We would like you to think of the embedded "value" part of the word "evaluate"-- what is the worth of the content of this site, framed in the context of the subject area that I teach? How does someone else's web course measure up against the courses I teach? Is it a site that can stand on its own as a resource for my students? Does it contain content or data that I can build an activity around? Does it look like a fly-by-night home page or is part of a known institution?
There are some general questions that you will probably consider when looking at any site. Given that we've presented our arbitrary four "flavors" of web sites, there are a set of additional different questions you might ask yourself for each "flavor".
Our approach consists of a series of questions that you should be able to answer after spending a reasonable amount of time rummaging through an instructional web site, be it a web course, class materials, web activity, or subject resource. Rather than including some arbitrary value-laden scale ("rate the design from 1 to 10"), we present a checklist that we encourage you to modify for your own usage. Please let us know what we've left out that you think is important!
With this in mind, we will now use our format to evaluate some of the sites you previously visited. (Let's put on our critical glasses!)