Enhancement of Mandarin courseware through formative evaluation

A Mandarin courseware has been developed initially to help Bumiputera students to improve in Mandarin pronunciations and speaking skills in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Terengganu. Before the courseware could be distributed to students, a formative evaluation has been done to guarantee its quality as a supplementary learning material. The study has been conducted during July 2008 – November 2008 semester which involved 32 Bachelor of Business Computing students at UiTM Terengganu. The formative evaluation has been carried out using paper based questionnaire presented to the students to evaluate different aspects of the courseware. The result reveals that most of the students agreed that the courseware could be used as a supplementary learning material. Among the recommendations from the students were to improve certain audio with unclear sounds in the Phonetics and Dictionary parts and to enhance the animation in the Chapter section. Based on the evaluation result, the enhancement of the Mandarin courseware was made by stages starting from Dec 2008 – April 2009 semester. There were 3 main things that have been enhanced since the first formative evaluation. The enhancements were the addition of English version of the courseware, the design of new interface (screen design) and the improvement of the sounds in most parts of the courseware.