A User-Centered Design Approach to Develop a Web-Based Instructional Resource System for Homeland Education

Under the national educational policy of Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum, elementary and junior high school teachers are expected to design their own instructional materials, and to teach their courses which could be linked to students’ daily lives. The policy also allocates funding to create a variety of web-based instructional resource systems in order to assist these teachers in preparing their classes. Upon the basis of a user-centered design approach, this study is aimed at constructing a set of suggestions of planning, designing, and developing a web-based instructional resource system for the homeland education. This research team takes Nei-Li area in Taiwan as an example to develop such a system, and constructs a user-centered design model. The study results indicate that, unlike the traditional instructional design approach, the proposed model takes into account the user’s needs, the capability of the project team, the resource availability for implementation, the national educational reform policy, the development of information technology industry, and the socio-cultural context of a community at the initial phase. In addition, the development process is divided into two courses, one for contents design while the other for system construction, both of which are implemented at the same time. https://doi.org/10.34105/j.kmel.2009.01.006