Increasingly we use online forms; generally, a good thing, efficient and ensuring information doesn’t get lost in transcription. One problem with this, though, is that it is hard to get an understanding of the entire process as an outsider who nonetheless needs to understand the process.
A couple of examples
- I was writing up a description for students about how to fill in a form for applying for postgraduate studies. The problem was that the form started with a “cover sheet” asking for basic details such as email address and course applied for. Okay, fine; I’ll just fill this in with some mock details and then move onto the next stage. No dice! The next page asked me to “check my email”. In the end I had to go quite a long way through the application process before I had all of the details. By contrast, a printed form would have meant that I could just scan through the whole form.
- Filling in details of a module on the Moodle online learning support system. Filled it in, looked fine to me. A few days later, got a couple of emails from students: “where are the notes that you said you had put online”. What had happened is that my view as a teacher was different from what the students see; I had to click on a picture of an eye to make the item visible to students. Not a bad system overall, but not obvious if you are used to writing traditional web pages.
Both of these relate to the idea of role management in online systems. They assume that it is easy to put people into a role relative to the system; yes, this is reasonable at some level, but we often need to “leap outside” this on some occasions. This is a difficult issue to sort out.