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Blog Post #5: What I've Learned and Goodbye

 I've realized that a lot of the research designs and other content in this class and the TWDR program as a whole are very similar to what I learned in my sociology classes, which is great since I really loved my sociology minor and the type of research sociologists do. I've also realized that I probably should've taken that recommended statistics class and gotten that social research methods certificate since we're doing the math in this program anyway. 😅 On that note, I also want to thank everyone who responded to my blog posts or otherwise gave me great feedback in class. You all contributed to making my work better by the end of the semester and I really appreciate that. Good luck with whatever you do going forward and thanks for making this a great class.
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Blog Post #4: Plans for Revision

My primary plan for revising is to fill out the parts of my research proposal that weren't done in my initial rough draft/outline. Also, Jesse's suggestion about narrowing down which particular DSU websites I want to analyze was helpful; I'll more than likely focus on the main DSU website, but I was considering looking at the registration website and myDixie as well since they have a lot of the same issues I'm focused on with the main website, and both the main and registration websites were updated during the course of my undergraduate degree, so I know how the old versions compare to the new ones.
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Blog Post #3: Research Gap

 As I mentioned in previous blog posts , the research gap I want to look into is how people feel about the usability of the DSU website specifically and what improvements they'd like to see. I feel like a mixed combination of both survey research and focus group usability tests would serve this purpose well. The surveys can show how users of the website already feel about its usefulness while the focus group usability tests would provide a more concrete analysis of which features are difficult to use and how they can best be improved in the next update(s) to the website (something which website professionals apparently suggested DSU do every few years anyway).
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Blog Post #2: Research Topic and Sources

I've decided to use the DSU website usability topic I mentioned in the first blog post for my research topic. I'm planning to use other universities' website usability studies and articles on methods for conducting usability studies as sources. With that in mind, my 10 tentative sources are as follows: Glenn Jones, P. W., & Davenport, E. K. (2021). Website Presence and Usability Among Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Journal of Negro Education , 90(1), 123–137. ( LINK ) Vlachogianni, P., & Tselios, N. (2021). Perceived usability evaluation of educational technology using the System Usability Scale (SUS): A systematic review. Journal of Research on Technology in Education , 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2020.1867938 ( LINK ) Lažetić, P. (2020). Studying similarities and differences in higher education organisations based on their websites – comparative methodological approaches and research potential. International Journal of Social Research Me...
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Blog Post #1: Topics of Interest

 I have a few (admittedly vague in some cases) ideas for research this semester. Effect of Font and Background Color - Madi inspired this idea, but I think it would be interesting for me to research the effect of font color and layout because I've seen them at play before and would like to get a better understanding of how they can impact what they're being used for. More specifically: I've noticed on state K-12 exams we could change the font and background color, and I think the idea was that different colors made things both easier to read and easier to focus on depending on the person. I'd like to know more about this. A similar concept to what I previously mentioned is at play in my job at CaptionCall (captioning phone calls for deaf people); we have the ability to personalize the font and background colors in the window where we caption calls. Again, I'd like to know more about the effect of this. TikTok Usability - Based on our first class discussion, I thin...
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