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Palestinian Journal for Open Learning & e-Learning

Palestinian Journal for Open Learning & e-Learning

Abstract

Websites play a pivotal role in various fields such as commerce, education, engineering and entertainment. As a result, there is an increased demand on designing and developing effective and easy to use websites to be delivered with a high degree of quality. University websites are the gateway to information and electronic services used by students, academics, researchers and library users. As a result, designing and developing websites must meet the needs of users and their services, as most universities adopt their web pages to create awareness and promote their activities through its users. Few university websites reach a good level in satisfying the needs of users, and although many academic webpages do not satisfy the needs of their users, we find that educational institutions reliance on websites is increasing to accomplish various tasks. Therefore, we need to evaluate the easiness of use of the websites. In this research, we proposed an automated methodology to assess the ease of use of university websites using data mining technology, and we conducted two experiments to evaluate university websites. The first experiment uses a questionnaire directed at students using the website such as use of color, display space, moving left and right. The second experiment uses automated tools to evaluate a scenario for a particular concern and to measure the features of the website that students cannot measure such as task time, number of mouse clicks, number of pages. We implemented our methodology on al-Azhar University - Gaza, and applied our methodology using the educational machine tool and extracting rules by means of data mining technology to evaluate the ease of use on the universities websites. The results showed that the methodology used, gave us strong rules for the use of the automated evaluation on the University.

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