Result+Findings

Result Findings
The results to follow are based off student surveys. Due to low participation, the findings are limited to only a small population. Also, please note that some participants did not answer all of the questions.

Write-Up
In attempts to understand the University of Toronto “Portal” used to connect students and their courses together, we created a survey which follows UTM students filled out. The majority of the students surveyed were male, and the majority fell into the third and fourth year student range. The programs ranged all across which gave variety in the different possible types of professor and courses that could be found on Portal.

We had hypothesized that Portal had the tendency to run slow or have downtimes during the evening, which was the worst times because we believed that was when students checked Portal the most. According to the results, the majority of the students did check Portal at night, and many of their courses were registered with Portal. Along with Portal, Slate and Wikispaces were also websites students had to use for varies courses.

Another hypothesis was that Portal as a whole was difficult to navigate, and was cluttered with too much unnecessary information. We also believed that students whose primary language was not English would have more difficulty navigating Portal. To our surprise, a high majority of students said that Portal was easy to navigate, or at least somewhat so. Although this could be due to the fact students have gotten used to using Portal by third or fourth year. This correlates with the fact that nearly all the students said that UofT should continue using Portal rather then switching to another website such as Wikispaces or Slate. This high majority also carried over to the usefulness of Portal as a whole, where most students said it was useful for checking marks and lecture notes.

However, the other features we hypothesized added to the overall clutter and confusion (such as the community, calendar and other features) proved true to the students. Not one student claimed to use the features found on Portal, and a few even claimed they were unaware of such features. As a result, when asked for suggestions, students often suggested for Portal to be a lot cleaner and simpler.

Finally, one of the major issues we had found with Portal was its slow load times. Our belief coincided with the result, where many students found Portal to be slow up to twenty-five percent of the time. But in conclusion, students preferred this version of Portal over the old one and being mainly older students have experienced both. Overall, they were content with continuing to use it for their courses in the future.


 * Graphical Results**










 * Suggested Changes**

Based on the results, some students have suggested changes they would like to have seen to Portal. Here are some of those changes: