| dc.description.abstract | A software programmer at the Southeast Kansas Education Service Center has developed the Skill Demonstration (SD) software for the Special Education classroom. SD has been used by 25 school districts for the past three years. A recent analysis of ‘last user login dates’ was performed revealing a great decline in usage. The goal of this field project was to create an instrument to communicate with SD users to determine reasons for usage decline. The instrument contained 14 questions, which were selected based on SD user interviews and literature research performed about customer/user information satisfaction. The instrument received 21.5% response rate. More than 89% of respondents supported SD being user friendly, conveniently available, providing sufficient information to make useful decisions, displaying clear formatted graphs, tables and data accuracy, keeping data confidentiality, and users were willing to recommend SD to colleagues. The instrument responses also suggested that SD was marketed online very poorly with 2.6% of participants discovering SD online. Forty-one percent of participants initiated communication regarding SD questions, leaving room for encouraging more communication with SD staff. The in-person training was believed to be effective by 79.5% of participants, which can be improved. The participants’ comments provided reasons for SD’s usage decline. SD is currently lacking user-desired features such as additional graphing features, data collection methods and having a bank of pre-entered skills. The conclusion of the project was the programmer would have to meet participants in-person to discuss adding desired features. A recommendation for additional work was for the programmer to encourage users to participate in the instrument again next year and compare next year’s results with the current results. | |
