“Educational Technology Toolkit: A Consumer’s Guide”

Description

What do students do as they study? What do faculty do as they teach? The answers to those questions help determine what students learn, and what they’re able to do after the courses are over.  The importance of their setting (campus, online, etc) is indirect: it makes some things easier, others harder. The starting point of any useful evaluation of a distance learning program needs to be on what people are doing, and why. Of the teaching/learning activities most important for the outcomes you’d like to see, which are happening? Are the facilities make that activity easy or hard? Are people choosing to do that activity (or doing something else instead)? If so, why? And how time-consuming are these activities in this setting? How burdensome?

A second governing assumption: when designing an evaluation of a course or a program, ask yourself, “No matter what I find, will my findings help people in the program improve what they’re doing and feel better about what they’re doing? Will some of what I’m asking be, from their point of view, a waste of time or a threat?” If you want people’s collaboration in your inquiry, design the inquiry to help reduce important uncertainties that they, too, are facing.