Hi everybody, sorry this is early and a bit rushed. Am having computer problems and will be without it for a while (Aaargh.), so thought I would try to get a bit ahead this week.

Week 2 Blog

· Why is evaluation important to you and how do you define it?
· What sort of evaluations mentioned on the presentation are familiar to you already and why?
· Why is quality important in eLearning?

Evaluation is important to me because I want students to have good learning experiences. I define it as thinking carefully about your course, how it will be used, who will use it, what will they learn, how will they learn it, how useful will the learning be. I define it as a whole lot of questions really!

As the presentation said, I am familiar with summative evaluation. I think I do some formative evaluation instinctively, but not formally, and I can see that it would be better to ask more questions at the beginning and throughout the process.

This is a resource I use to run through a checklist of what I should be considering. I think it is useful as a quick guide. I would welcome other people’s thoughts on it.
http://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/ID/evaluatingcourses.pdf

Quality is important in eLearning for a number of reasons. If our courses are not good quality we lose students, students don’t pass, they get discouraged, we get discouraged, a lot of money and time and effort gets wasted. It is much better to have quality courses which satisfy learning needs and create positive teaching and learning experiences.

Catch you again soon.

Adrienne

Who am I?

Hi everyone,

My name is Adrienne. My main work at the moment is caring for and educating my 2 year old daughter. Before I had her I worked as an Instructional Designer at SIT in Invercargill. Prior to this I studied and taught Film, Television and Media Studies.

I am interested in evaluation because it improves your practice and helps you to know that you are on the right track. What I know already? Hmmm. I found a useful list of guidelines once. I will find the address and publish it on this blog. It is probably not a lot compared to what there is to know ;).

What I hope to get out of this course is to learn about useful processes for evaluating courses, creating courses and making sure that they give the best possible learning experience for students.

I don't have ideas for an evaluation project yet. Because I am not working at the moment, Bronwyn has kindly offered to let me evaluate one from Otago. Watch this space.

First Blog

Hi everyone, this is the first blog that I have done. It was quite easy. Thanks for taking me through it. Adrienne