Creating a Training Website - Insight and Hindsight

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

- Gail Godwin

To get back to my focus regarding women and technology, I want to write a bit about a training website I created for the NJIT ADVANCE grant that focuses on connecting women researchers in science and engineering to each other, to their male peers, and to their female counterparts in industry and government. You can access the website at sites.google.com/site/advancetrainingsite/.

Here is a screenshot of the home page of the training website.

And here is a picture of what the NJIT ADVANCE grant is examining – NJIT faculty social networks based on coauthorship of publications.

Although I created this website as an exercise for a web design class, it is actually going to be useful to the NJIT ADVANCE grant team. All the information on data conversion, as well as the sample files I provided so trainees could practice the steps themselves, are all real and correct. In fact, Dr. Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, the PI on the grant, is already planning to use it to train some new team members. Which means I should be getting some good usability feedback!

How did I come up with the design, you might ask? Well, I had some assumptions about my trainees that helped me design the website more effectively. For example, my learners are primarily verbal, so they prefer textual explanations rather than complex diagrams. I therefore focused on documenting the steps, providing links to visuals if the learner wants to view them. The visuals are annotated to make sure the learner knows what he or she is looking at.

My learners are more reflective than active, meaning that they like to think through a problem before jumping right in to solve it. So I documented all the steps and provided sample files so the learners could actually try the steps whenever they felt ready.

Luckily, my trainees are more sequential thinkers than global thinkers. That fits well with the entire concept of the site which is very sequential – the steps need to be performed in a certain order, and that is how they are documented. I don’t provide links for the trainees to jump around within modules because that would really mess up the data conversion.

And finally, my learners are more intuitive than sensing. What does that mean? It means they like to learn abstract concepts rather than necessarily real-life examples. To address this preference, I tried to explain the why of the steps instead of just the implementation.

In terms of the overall design of the site, I worked with the red and blue colors to maintain a coherent identity with NJIT (red) and the ADVANCE logo (blue and red). I provided a single page that contains all the formulas so that learners could reference it easily even after they are confident that they know all the steps. They can also print out the formula page and have it as a reference. I also provided a page with software requirements, including a link to the Analytic Technologies site where the learner can download UCINet 6 as a free trial version.