Criteria for Online Text

---

The online, remote nature of Web-based training, depending on how it's being delivered, prevents visual contact between the instructor and the students. Accuracy of the online material and the stability and ease-of-use of the technology become the standards of how we, as instructors, are judged.

Each page then, must be of sound, high quality. We can measure the quality of our Web pages by testing them against four formal criteria. An agreement must be made on the criteria before we can make measurements of quality. The four criteria I use are:

• readability
• availability
• suitability
• accessibility

Availability
There are training sites who provide no documentation (or nearly none) and can still use Web technology in training. Typically, such sites specialize in the continuing education of highly specialized people. New and intermediate students are not the norm and are referred to another institution. Until this type of training center hires someone with knowledge as to what new and intermediate students need, it will continue on its present course.

Suitability
Using documentation provided from other sources, such as material from subject matter experts and engineers, can add great value to the course. Unfortunately, such documentation often has an encyclopedic view: "Drop everything into one big reference document and let the students wade through it on their own". Analyze the material and align it with the tasks and interests of the students. Without this analysis, such "comprehensive" text will often be unsuitable, unusable, and unreliable.

Accessibility
Online documentation can have exactly what the student needs, but its usefuleness will be diminished greatly if it is a hopeless tangle. As a result, students have to skip, jump, branch, and what-not from page to page. Eventually they will get lost. A Web-based course that isn't organized will probably lose even the most experienced surfer.

This isn't to say that non-linearity should be abandoned. One of the advantages of Web-based training is the flexibility of the student to jump around from page to page. Non-linearity also reduces the duplication of work. Non-linearity, at the same time, doesn't grant permission for the lack of organization. An online course that is both suitable and accessible are likely to be task oriented. This means that the material has been analyzed and organized according to what students do, how they use the system, and what information they need.

Readability
Even when courseware is suitable and accessible, the ultimate quality resides in how easily and accurately the material can be understood by the student; its readability. Language and style are not "frills" and text should be professionally edited to produce high quality courseware.

Every sentence should be as readable as possible, but well-written sentences offer no real benefit to useability if they are the wrong ones or if they are in an unworkable arrangement. Older documents, as a rule, cannot be made usable merely by improving their style.

Site Home Page
Web-based Training Introduction Page
Table of Contents

Last Modified: February, 2005