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
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This blog is used to participate in two courses for the Graduate Certificate in Applied eLearning - Evaluation for Best Practice and Facilitating Online Communities. Comments and feedback very welcome!
Nicely written and great resource given at the end :)
ReplyDeleteAdrienne you have certainly touched on some very important reasons for making sure your courses meet quality - retention of students and satisfaction of students and teachers. The criteria for evaluation of course design are very comprehensive which is essential when people are starting out. Otherwise, people bumble along and don't realise what is missed until students start getting agitated.
ReplyDeleteI will be interested to see how you think the eLearning guidelines compare as there are some similarities. It will be a very useful resource to complement other material in the course and will help people think up questions for collecting data for their evaluation projects. You might like to check out the news release about Quality on the line (International benchmarks for distance learning at: http://www.ihep.org/press-room/news_release-detail.cfm?id=142
Hi Adrienne
ReplyDeleteI have a sneaky suspicion that we may have worked together on one of the other GradCert of eLearning courses.
You make some very valid points in your post.
Regarding your comment about the importance of quality in eLearning - your comments apply to all teaching, but I think this is even more important in online learning because students cannot rely on having a face to face teacher on hand to ask questions, clarify, or keep them on track. So it is crucial that the course is well structured, instructions and activities are clear and easy to understand, and the assessments are inline with the learning. Probably formative assessments are more important here to, to keep that the learner is on the right track.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Michelle
Hi Adrienne
ReplyDeleteThe document you are referring to is a useful check list of all that need to be in place for an eLearning course to run successfully.
I am sure I will use it at some point in the near future.
Hervé
I am adding this now, as I had missed out on this part earlier in the course. In some ways it is quite good to have completed the course and be reviewing ideas on evaluation as I have a far better understanding of evaluation than maybe I did at wek 2. Adrienne, I would agree that if we are to have good learning experiences then quality is paramount and that it may be even more important with elearning when there is not the same f2f contact.
ReplyDelete