Evaluation

• User Evaluations. One way to determine whether the site and its materials are meeting the needs of the users we have in mind is to establish a comment `box' somewhere on the site, where users can send us email messages of various sorts, responding to questions we put to them, or allowing for open-ended commentary. We would establish this box after the first three months of operation, and begin to take these comments into consideration when constructing future elements of the system.

• Teacher Evaluation. The number of people professionally involved in teaching Tamil in North America, Japan, and Europe is very small, and we all know each other. I propose to circularize them after we have been in operation for three months, and ask for their opinions. Many of them will in fact be contributors to the site, so they will have personal opinions about how we have used their materials, as well as about other materials. We will focus on the balance between written and spoken materials, the pedagogy and methodology of the materials and how they could be improved, and what gaps they perceive to exist between the existing materials and desiderata for the future.

• Multimedia Professionals. A third metric of quality would be to ask a multimedia professional (as yet unnamed) to evaluate the site, as an outside consultant. Funds to do this are requested in the budget. This would be done before the annual deadline for new requests, in order to strengthen our argument for renewed funding. (I envisage this as a multi-year project; subsequent years might involve a request for funds to finish the English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb project that is now about two-thirds done, allowing us to put this dictionary on line as an additional teaching tool.