The importance of Higher Education Website and its Usability

Abstract

Now a days the need for higher education institutions to a have a reliable, effective and attractive web presence is increasing as online technology is becoming an important part of the educational process. The higher education institutions play a vital role in the development of a society while higher education websites have many roles to fill. They need to provide information for prospective students, current students, Faculty and alumni. They often need to include reams of information in a way that makes everything easy to explore and it's a great challenge. The purpose of this research is to highlight some points, which will show the importance of higher education websites where we have studied lots of literature to be more focused on the topic and conducted a survey to evaluate the usability of two websites. The paper will be helpful for the higher authorities and the web developers to analyze the significance of the website of higher education institutes and its usability.

Online Disclosure of University Environmental Responsibility: A Case of Indonesia

“…To fulfill the obligations to stakeholders, that are accountability and transparency, university chooses to use various communication channels. Website media is an alternative form of communication with stakeholders which is easy and inexpensive (Manzoor et al, 2012). More stakeholders of the university seek information online, because it is easy and practical.…”

“…Website is one of the communication media that must be owned by the university because it has great benefits. Nowadays, more and more potential prospective students are getting information and making decisions to choose universities based on university websites (Manzoor, Hussain, Ahmed, & Iqbal, 2012;Schimmel, Motley, Marco, & Eschenfelder, 2010). Websites play a key role to improve information transparency (Meijer 2009), improve communication, and enrich the type of information delivered to people (Djajadikerta & Trireksani, 2012).…”

Differences between perceived usefulness of social media and institutional channels by undergraduate students

“…Thus, in order for a student to be satisfied with a given system, it is necessary for the system to present availability, reliability and speed (Sun et al 2008). Furthermore, the system's access ought to be simple and free of technical fails (Manzoor et al 2012). With that in mind we could propose that:…”

Content Analysis of Faculty Web Sites

“…The higher education area also uses the Internet. It is necessary to provide fast and reliable information exchange as well as unlimited contact between teachers, current and future students [1]. The potential of the Internet is used successfully by companies engaged in the placement of products and services, but their use is also desirable for the promotion of higher education institutions [2,3].…”

“…The Internet allows data transfer at a high speed and thus creates a bridge between the sender and the recipient. In this way, the largest number of higher education institutions opens up the possibility for advertising through web sites [1,4]. The Internet is an important source of information for any sphere of creativity.…”