Affiliation:
1. University Park College of IST, Penn State, , Pennsylvania, 16802, USA
Abstract
Abstract
Websites for university units provide lists of faculty (teaching staff) to support a variety of users’ tasks including creating collaborations and student choice for projects and courses. However, these lists often only provide shallow features about the faculty such as pictures and names and not the semantic attributes of expertise, interest, or accomplishments. Prospective students, faculty, parents, donors, and those in the community often cannot directly access these semantic attributes and sometimes not without extensive search. Not having scholarship-focused individual entries leaves the selection process more open for implicit and explicit biases to be applied when searching for areas of expertise—if the website is face-focused (only pictures and names are provided), users can only choose (or choose who to explore further) based solely on name and physical appearance, thus including race, clothing and attractiveness. This paper argues for ease of access to the right information and self-authorship of the public-facing information. We document that this problem is pervasive at universities across the world (n = 275). We suggest good practices for decreasing the prominence of less relevant information to summarize faculty. This is accomplished by increasing the prominence and accessibility of more relevant information, including self-reported research interests and accomplishments. We provide example templates to support more semantic choices that would be applicable to similar organizational lists. This approach could be applied to other sets of professionals, such as doctors and lawyers.
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Subject
Human-Computer Interaction,Software,Library and Information Sciences
Reference19 articles.
1. The Foley Grail
2. Addressing the fundamental error of design using the ABCS;Baxter;AIS SIGHCI Newsletter,2014
3. Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination;Bertrand;Am. Econ. Rev.,2004
4. Designing for the student: users' styles and department web sites;Hall;Innovate: Journal of Online Education,2008
5. Beauty in the classroom: instructors’ pulchritude and putative pedagogical productivity;Hamermesh;Econ. Educ. Rev.,2005