Evaluating an example of online education: Making The Modern World



Exciting Rich Media Scene on the
Making The Modern World website



Making The Modern World is a website aimed for A level and vocational students to help them with their studies and learning about ICT and the internet. The site's main purpose is to display information for students to read from and make notes from for their own personal studies; this purpose to me calls for a site with short snappy notes and an exciting display to catch people's attention and hold it whilst giving them something in an interesting format to focus on and understand.

The site teaches lessons about the history of the internet and some major pieces of technology, as well as some huge major breakthroughs in machinary. The website quotes that the 'Stores Timeline' contains all the "powerful stories about the world we have made through science and invention. It also offers the icons of invention, going into depths about Science, Technology and Medicine, as well as guided tours such as 'Technology as a passport' which is considered vital information for A Level students.  



Example of text on a page
of the website



The first thing I noticed about the website, Making The Modern World, was it's ineresting display and extremely creative graphics on the homepage. The text is clear to read and the site is modern and up to date which what students want. When I went on the page 'Stories Timeline', the timeline graphic caught my attention whilst I rolled my mouse over it, as well as clicking on the indivdual eras to find a sliding driop down menu appear, but as soon as I clicked on the link for 'Personal computers and information networks', it all changed. 

I found the text was underlined and badly displayed in a grey font against a white background; it was also in huge chunks of text which was hard to scan through quickly, as well there being awkwardly played photos: overall just a bad layout. I found having the text displayed this way made it harder to understand and process and take in. I found myself becoming bored instantly and finding it hard to concentrate.

Then I came to the first of the Rich Media Scene which then instantly brightened up the website and made the facts more interesting; I then took in moe information due to the creative animations, such as the spinnng wheel for the companies bidding to become the leaders in the computer market. These rich text scenes where instantly a hit and I felt more excited about the website and more eager to learn. If only the rest of the text about personal computers was as exciting as this. I find that as a education website, that this site doesn't quite offer what students are looking for on it's information: it needs to keep up these colours and graphics on most of it's pages and give smaller bullet pointed facts to quickly make notes from, instead of these huge chunks of text. It needs to be useless and not cause more confusion