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last.updated 6.16.14

Evaluating Courses & Programs

Purpose

Once a program or individual instructor has designed a writing course to teach from a distance, one should assess the course's success for both personal and administrative reasons. In today's class we will discuss reasons to assess one's distance learning course and the strategies one can adopt of evaluating courses and/or programs.

Have we created a community?

We will begin the class discussing your responses to the community analysis assignment.

Discussion–So how did it go?

We will discuss the following questions:

• What questions do you have about the readings?
• In terms of distance courses, what is the difference between formative and summative assessment?
• What problems might arise when one's only method of evaluation is the same used for onsite courses?
• In what ways does activity theory help us to design responsible evaluations methods?

Class Activity–Evaluating English 724/824

The university should have sent you a message asking you to evaluate English 795/895 Teaching Writing From a Distance. The questions that you will be asked are:

Likert 1-5

1. In the first week of class, the instructor provided documents and information that clearly explained the course content, assignments, grading and other important policies
2. The course materials , exams, projects and/or papers in the class required me to think critically
3. The instructor welcomed questions and other class participation
4. The instructor was enthusiastic with respect to the subject matter
5. The instructor was available for consultation and helpful during office hours
6. The instructor arrived on time for class and used the dull class period allotted
7. In order to get good grades on tests and assignments, I has to know the course materials outlined in the syllabus and discussed in class
8. The instructor's presentations were informative
9. Overall, I have learned or benefited from this class
10. Overall, the instructor is an effective teacher
11. Rate the instructor's fairness in testing and grading
12. Rate the instructor's fairness to women and minorities
13. Rate the instructor's enthusiasm for the course material
14. Rate the instructor's encouragement of class participation
15. Rate the instructor's accessibility to students

Qualitative

• What factors about this class contributed the most to your learning? What aspects of this class helped you to learn/think critically?
• What did you like most about the class and your instructor?
• What changes, if any, could be made to the class that would have helped you to learn more? What could the instructor have done to make the course an even better learning experience?
• What factors about your own performance help you learn the most? What did you do to facilitate this learning?
• What could you have done to make the course an even better learning experience

Which of these questions do you think is fair to ask of a distance education course? Which are not? Why? What other questions should be asked of distance education courses? What other questions should be asked of writing course? How might you revise some of these questions to make them more suitable for a writing course taught from a distance?

The instructor will cut and paste these evaluation question into a Google Doc and let the class loose to revise, add, relate, and comment upon the points. After 20-30 miutes we will discuss the results of these revisions.