As you're evaluating graduate schools, which universities do you feel have the best user interfaces?
After looking around the webpages of so many universities, I can appreciate my own university (University of Washington) a lot more. Many at UW are pretty liberal about putting class webpages up online, and the site design is usually quite slick across departments. Professors also have a lot of independence over their own webpages (rather than borrowing the department's awkward interface, which rarely meshes well with what the professor puts up). It's not MIT (MIT still wins), but even then, it beats MIT in that it doesn't paywall most of its course content behind Kerbedos (sure MIT has OCW, but OCW is practically useless compared to a good course website).
I can't even believe how many Ivy League universities don't even list course webpages on their departmental webpage. When it comes to information that's helpful to applicants, many universities show practically nothing.
Not only that, but it's one of the very few universities where departments often archive class webpages across multiple years. Want to see how a CS course looked 5 years ago? Then check this out: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse473/. I've never seen a parallel like that anywhere else for any other school or department. But at the UW, this applies for not only CS courses, but also Atmospheric Science ones, and others too.
Posted Dec 29, 2011, 2:40 AM UTC · edited