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last.updated 6.24.12

 

Evaluating Courses & Programs


Purpose

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


Review–Discussing your Second Life and the Future of OWI

We will start the class by discussing your experiences in Second Life and the reading about the future of online writing instruction.

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 795/895

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?

We will discuss these questions. In doing so, we will both frame this assessment in the abstract and apply it to this course. In essence, the instructor will ask for your help developing a supplemental evaluation for this course. The instructor will be taking notes in Google Docs so that you can follow along.

If there is time left at the end of class, you will have an opportunity to use course time to respond to these assessments.

Freewrite–Joining the Conversation

For ten minutes you will respond to the following prompt:

We have covered a lot of material in this class. If I were to tell you that your final project was to contribute a chapter to an edited collectionabout online writing instruction, what would your chapter be about? Why? Take the time to answer these questions and begin outlining this chapter.

Discussion–Making the Pitch

You will each have one minute to make a pitch to camera (yeah... I was just watching Next Food Network Star) about the chapter you would write. We will end class this way so that you can think about how you can particpate within the conversation that you all started participating in during this class, and so you can hear other's ideas and think about how you might be able to collaborate with others in the class to do this.

Questions

In the remaining time I will hang around and field any questions that students have about finishing up the course.