Chronic Viral Diseases Branch, Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia 30333, USA.
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2012 May-Jun;19(3):489-94. doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000287. Epub 2011 Oct 5.
To evaluate the web structure of two web-based continuing education courses, identify problems and assess the effects of web site modifications.
Markov chain models were built from 2008 web usage data to evaluate the courses' web structure and navigation patterns. The web site was then modified to resolve identified design issues and the improvement in user activity over the subsequent 12 months was quantitatively evaluated.
Web navigation paths were collected between 2008 and 2010. The probability of navigating from one web page to another was analyzed.
The continuing education courses' sequential structure design was clearly reflected in the resulting actual web usage models, and none of the skip transitions provided was heavily used. The web navigation patterns of the two different continuing education courses were similar. Two possible design flaws were identified and fixed in only one of the two courses. Over the following 12 months, the drop-out rate in the modified course significantly decreased from 41% to 35%, but remained unchanged in the unmodified course. The web improvement effects were further verified via a second-order Markov chain model.
The results imply that differences in web content have less impact than web structure design on how learners navigate through continuing education courses. Evaluation of user navigation can help identify web design flaws and guide modifications. This study showed that Markov chain models provide a valuable tool to evaluate web-based education courses. Both the results and techniques in this study would be very useful for public health education and research specialists.
评估两个基于网络的继续教育课程的网页结构，识别问题并评估网站修改的效果。
使用 2008 年的网络使用数据构建马尔可夫链模型，以评估课程的网页结构和导航模式。然后修改网站以解决已识别的设计问题，并在随后的 12 个月内定量评估用户活动的改善情况。
在 2008 年至 2010 年期间收集网页导航路径。分析从一个网页导航到另一个网页的概率。
继续教育课程的顺序结构设计在生成的实际网页使用模型中得到了清晰的反映，并且没有一个提供的跳转过渡被大量使用。两个不同的继续教育课程的网页导航模式相似。在两个课程中的一个课程中确定并修复了两个可能的设计缺陷。在接下来的 12 个月中，修改后的课程的辍学率从 41%显著下降到 35%，而未修改的课程则保持不变。通过二阶马尔可夫链模型进一步验证了网页改进效果。
结果表明，与网页结构设计相比，网页内容的差异对学习者如何浏览继续教育课程的影响较小。评估用户导航可以帮助识别网页设计缺陷并指导修改。本研究表明，马尔可夫链模型为评估基于网络的教育课程提供了一种有价值的工具。本研究的结果和技术对于公共卫生教育和研究专家非常有用。
