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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

Evaluating Websites

Evaluating websites is a crucial skill for scholarly work. The quality of websites varies widely and many of them actively attempt to deceive their readers.

Some things to consider:

Who has put the website together?

Can you find out about them? Are they credible? You can try searching Wikipedia or other web resources (through Google, perhaps) to see what you can find out about the website that is not based on what the website says about itself.

How old is the website?

You can look the website up at http://whois.domaintools.com/ to get some idea of when the URL was purchased or check out the Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web/ to see when the site was first archived.

How well documented is the website?

Are there links to outside sources that are credible? Are those sources actually used properly rather than simply offering the appearance of support?