Olelo International
INTRODUCTION
The idea behind this website is to create an easy to use forum for students and faculty at UH Manoa. The purpose of the forum is to allows students and faculty to connect, and get more hands on practice with foreign languages. UH Manoa has a second language requirement for nearly all majors, as well as a very diverse population that is often multilingual. It is hoped that the forum will help students get more practice beyond the classroom, whether it be for the required language courses, foreign students wanting to enhance their English skills
, etc.
INITIAL USER STUDY
After launching the crucial features of Olelo International, a team member utilized a sibling who, along with several friends, are UH Manoa students, with various backgrounds and fields of study. These students are not studying Information and Computer Sciences, which allowed the team to experience feedback from users that are not technically savvy, or have any background in development.
For conducting the study, the most convenient route was to launch the site on each participant’s laptop. This allowed for the team to see if there were any variations based on browser. Each participant was asked to make an account, sign out, sign in, and to test a variety of language forums via posting and commenting. The contents of the posts and comments had to requirement by the team, and was purely for testing the order and persistence of the website.
After conducting the study, the team was able to analyze and learn about areas for improvement, and areas of success. The biggest compliments were the concept and variety of language forums. The participants raved about how useful the forums are for multilingual, international exchange, and study abroad students, as well as those fulfilling the second language requirement and want extra practice outside of the classroom. The variety of forums was also greatly applauded, though on participant did request Hawaiian Pidgin. The forums do cover languages such as Japanese, Greek, Cambodian, Maori, Russian, Spanish, and many more. This felt like a true win for the team, as a lot of effort was dedicated to select a good starting set of language forums that suit the UH Manoa users.
As for areas of improvement, some users pointed out that not all features were completely functional, which the team is aware of. The site has a “My Profile” feature, which is still under development. Also, under the name of each language forum, there is a list of course numbers correlating to the courses for each language offered at UH Manoa. The team hopes to add a label within the language forum names stating the numbers represent UH Manoa courses. Lastly, one participant mentioned that the forums were “cookie cutter”. The team concluded that uniform bases for the forums will be optimal for maintenance. However, if traffic to the site were to increase, then the appearance will the have some variety between forums.
Overall, the initial testing for Olelo International was very successful and informative to the team. There was a mix of areas of success and areas for improvement. The areas for improvement may also serve as another learning opportunity as the team works on developing solutions for these areas of improvement.
IMAGES
Landing page for Olelo International github.io site
Landing page for Olelo International, launched via Galaxy.
The site offers a variety of language forums for student and faculty use
The site also allows users to request language forums that do not exist yet. Admin then adds language forums as per request.
NOTE: This is a group project. Areas of responsibility: Home page, Register (new accounts), Initial User Study, User Profile (still in development).