Week Nine: Quality in eLearning

sugar magnolia By emdot marya

This week you need to keep working on your plans and also have a look at Quality in eLearning so you can incorporate some of this into your final plan.  The due date for your evaluation plan is 4 October 2010 - for publishing finished plan on the wiki project page with a link to it posted on your blogs.  I am open to negotiation on this.  Dates for the other assessments are now on the wiki in Assessments.  Remember your plans also need to include the actual sampling tools you are going to use, e.g.,  survey, interview etc. I can then give feedback on your survey and interview questions, if you are going down that track. So your tasks this week are to:

•  Explore quality benchmarks for eLearning.
•  Define quality in your context.
• Arrange participants for the evaluation.

Web conference 

Michael Winter from CoreEd will talk to us about his research evaluation of the SLENZ Second Life project on 22 September - 18:30 – 19:30 on Elluminate - Click for the Online meetings. This will be recorded if you can't make it. You may wish to read: Winter, M. (2010).  Second Life Education in New Zealand: Evaluation Research Final Report .

Quality in eLearning
There is lots of material about benchmarking guidelines and frameworks. Of course we have the eLearning Guidelines which you have been exploring, and as we know quality is a complex area and a lot broader than a few guidelines. A good place to start for the New Zealand context is the E-Learning Maturity Model
which incorporates a wide range of eLearning areas.  The model includes checklists you can use, each type depending on which area of eLearning in your organisation you are measuring for quality.  Some of you may already have been involved in this exercise.

In the first instance you need to decide on the type of outcome do you want from benchmarking and this is covered in the Maturity Model Getting Started.  The E–learning Maturity Model Process Assessment Workbook describes five main areas for assessing quality and benchmarking eLearning: For example:

1. Learning Processes that directly impact on pedagogical aspects of e-learning; 
2. Development Processes surrounding the creation and maintenance of e-learning resources; 
3. Support Processes surrounding the oversight and management of e-learning; 
4. Evaluation Processes surrounding the evaluation and quality control of e-learning through its entire lifecycle; 
5. Organisation Processes associated with institutional planning and management.

I have organised material in the  References section on the course website.  See: 1.1.1 Benchmarking eLearning material. There is no topic called quality in the wiki as all the material you need to look at is in the References section. If you wish to define quality in your context on your blog this would be great, but you can also incorporate this aspect into your plans which is where I would rather see it.  

What's next?
 This week I will be looking at your aim/purpose, big picture questions and decisions to make sure these pieces of the puzzle fit well together. Remember there is a holiday break 27 September to 10 October. Aim to start collecting your data at the end of the holiday so get organising with participants once your plans are submitted. Have a great week.