Towards Developing a Framework to Analyze the Qualities of the University Websites

Abstract

The website of a university is considered to be a virtual gateway to provide primary resources to its stakeholders. It can play an indispensable role in disseminating information about a university to a variety of audience at a time. Thus, the quality of an academic website requires special attention to fulfil the users’ need. This paper presents a multi-method approach of quality assessment of the academic websites, in the context of universities of Bangladesh. We developed an automated web-based tool that can evaluate any academic website based on three criteria, which are as follows: content of information, loading time and overall performance. Content of information contains many sub criteria, such as university vision and mission, faculty information, notice board and so on. This tool can also perform comparative analysis among several academic websites and generate a ranked list of these. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first initiative to develop an automated tool for accessing academic website quality in context of Bangladesh. Beside this, we have conducted a questionnaire-based statistical evaluation among several universities to obtain the respective users’ feedback about their academic websites. Then, a ranked list is generated based on the survey result that is almost similar to the ranked list got from the University ranking systems. This validates the effectiveness of our developed tool in accessing academic website.

Evaluating The Usability of Three of The Lowermost Krg/Iraq University Websites in Webometrics Based on User Perspective

“…Other researchers used web based tools depending on three measurements; Content of information, loading time and overall performance, to evaluate the context of universities of Bangladesh website. Beside this, authors provide comparative analysis amongst university platforms to create a ranking list based on the survey result (Rashida, M., 2021) 17 . Most of the researchers use questionnaire techniques to evaluate usability of the websites; Chiew and Salim organise a usability questionnaire including 24 evaluation questions that are implemented as a Web-based tool.…”

Usability of University Websites as Information Sources: A Review and Synthesis Based on 2021 Publications Indexed in Scopus Database

“…Rashida et al [11] developed a multi-method approach to assessing the quality of academic websites in the context of Bangladeshi universities. They conducted a questionnaire-based statistical evaluation of many universities' academic websites to get input from their respective users.…”

“…It can be quite useful in communicating information about a university to many people. As a result, the quality of a UW necessitates specific consideration to suit the expectations of all users [11]. Therefore, UW should be user-friendly [12] to meet the expectations of its visitors.…”

“…UWs had been well investigated for improvement of usability for all users in general [3,5,8,[10][11][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], such as students-lectures [4,13,25], people with disabilities [26], and even during the pandemic time [26][27][28][29]. However, there has been no holistic understanding and general trends based on the above literature on UW.…”

Development of an Approach to Evaluate Website Effectiveness

“…Several criteria can influence the quality of a website, for example, security, interface design, loading time, content, and other factors. Two methods can be used to evaluate a website: by gathering the opinion of users or by running automated tools [10].…”