Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Weeks one to three summary of blog posts - Part one

Wonderful Fish! by Katie

There have certainly been some golden achievements in the last three weeks, and I am really enjoying the way you have all been swimming around exploring the murky waters of evaluation - it is great to read your ideas and discoveries on your blogs. Everyone appears to have completed the tasters - great going - and hats off to Dana and Louise who have completed the Evaluate This exercise. I have tried to summarise some of the key points you have made and attempted to point you to others' posts to highlight some of them. Lets continue the debate on the email forum. The post is broken up into three parts otherwise it will be longer than I really like, but you have done so much...........

Jon in his post about the importance of evaluation has modeled good design and made some great points.   His blog certainly catches the eye, and the posts are colourful, and interesting. Certainly I find short chunks of text interspersed with images and headings, help me read the blog more quickly. They also draw the eye to the important items and key messages you are putting to the reader.  He has some experience with using evaluation to reach some of the holders of  funding, and can see the need for it in teaching and learning.
Jon aligns his assessment of the tasty taster about Career Development with soup - a great metaphor for formative evaluation. I really like the suggestion of using the KISS rule first (Keep it simple). See if you can discover how his solutions are different to those provided by Dana and Louise.

Jon's partner in crime, Kevin struggled off his death bed to complete the taster. He sure looks ill. See if you can spot whether the delerium of man-flu has crept into his post. The Career Development taster was chosen as Kevin says because there was more potential for finding solutions. He suggests a comprehensive list of strategies such as staircasing and PD for the teachers.

Mareena describes one of the most important indicators of learning - the assessment process. The effectiveness of the teachers is also an important part of this, and she has illustrated how the terms evaluation and assessment are one and the same. In eLearning there has been a strong focus on evaluating the look and feel of materials, and the instructions for learning as well as the strategies. We have become aware that the success of students depends strongly on the environment and their experience and there are many factors which can impact on this.

Alex has come up with some great explanations about the differences between assessment and evaluation:
" ...you assess a learner and evaluate the course.  So, assessment is identifying the capability of an individual (or group) to perform a task. Evaluation is identifying how well the instruction or resources supporting the learning and assessment of a task/concept/process worked for the individual/group." It is interesting how a company, in comparison to a tertiary institution, is more likely to undertake evaluations to gather evidence to investigate the return on investment (ROI) in eLearning. Now Alex has found a partner, we will be hearing more about the mock evaluations.....
 
Louise and Dana have both posted the work they have done on one of the tasters and the Evaluate This exercise. Dana and Louise have also chosen the evaluation taster about Career Development. See if you can spot the different perspectives. For example Dana says: " the most important issue is the lack of knowledge and skill in how to evaluate an on-line course, its design of materials and how to investigate the level of support required for the students". In contrast to Jon, they have discussed both formative and summative evaluation as possibilities, and have decided that the developer needs to know more about:

In the Evaluate This exercise, both Louise and Dana have used screen shots well to illustrate the points they are making, There is an explanation about why the Essay writing module is appropriate for the Bachelor of Nursing. They have chosen eLearning Guidelines  for learner centred and teaching relationships. Dana has also posted two statements to illustrate why these were chosen, and Louise has provided some rationale for them. See if you can find his sayings. Dana defines evaluation as:
Evaluation requires deciding on the purpose of the evaluation and can involve the following questions and responding appropriately:



1 comment:

Dana said...

Thank you Bronwyn for your nice description of everyone's comments and responses.
Great description indeed.

Regards.

Dana