ICS2003-05-03: The design, implementation, and evaluation of CLEW: An improved Collegiate Department Website - A. Kagawa

The purpose of a collegiate department website is to provide prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, and other academic and industry professionals with information concerning the department. The information presented on the website should give the user an accurate model of the department, even as it changes overtime. Some of these changes include: adding new faculty members, new students, new courses, etc. The more accurately the website models the department, the more aware the web site's users will be of the department.Traditional collegiate department websites have two primary problems increating an accurate model of their department. First, only a few people,usually the department webmasters, can add information to the website.Second, it is difficult to enable website users to be informed of changes to the website that might be of interest to them. These two problems decrease the accuracy of the model and hamper its effectiveness in alerting users of changes to the website. As a result, user awareness of the department is also decreased.The Collaborative Educational Website (CLEW) is a Java web application intended to support accurate modeling of a collegiate department. CLEW is designed to solve the traditional collegiate department web site's two main problems. First, it provides interactive services which will allow users to add various kinds of information to the website. Secondly, CLEW addresses the notification problem by providing tailored email notifications of changes to the website. CLEW was developed by a Software Engineering class in the Information and Computer Science Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. My role in this development as project leader is to design and implement the framework for the system. CLEW currently contains approximately 28,000 lines of Java code and it contains upwards of 500 web pages. In the Spring 2003 semester, CLEW replaced the existing Information and Computer Science Department website. I evaluated CLEW to measure its effectiveness as a model of the department using a pre and post release questionnaire. I also evaluated usage data of the CLEW System to assess the functionality provided by CLEW.If CLEW provides a more accurate model of a collegiate department,then the next step is to provide the CLEW framework to other collegiate departments worldwide. It is my hope that the users' of CLEW will get a clue about their department!

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