Week 3: eLearning guidelines for quality

The first task this week was to get familiar with the eLearning Guidelines for New Zealand: http://elg.massey.ac.nz/. Excellent content! It is a great idea to use a cube for identifying the different elements in a 3 entry table. Mind you, the interface could be improved by allowing clicking directly on the “cubelets”. Enough of evaluating of eLearning tools, let’s go to the core of this week’s work.

• In regards with the course evaluation suggested in the week 1 posting, I have chosen two eLearning guidelines relevant to my area of practise.

1. TT6 Are online activities available that will enable students to assess their learning?
2. TD1 Is the use of e-learning appropriate to the intended learning outcomes?
There already are several assessment tools I am using for the present format of the course. It would be interesting to see if I could develop or use further tools to enhance student learning. It might be that my use of eLearning tool in this context is not the best match for the learning outcomes.

• I have identified two issues I think are important related to the quality of eLearning.

1. Issue 1: The confusion that can arise from using too many different tools at the same time at the beginning of a course
   
2. Issue 2: The lack of interaction between students and staff.

Issue 1 can be linked to guidelines one and two. The fact that I am using two different LMS at the same time for the same course made me aware of the potential confusion for the students, at least at the beginning of each semester.
Issue 2 can be resolved by carefully selecting the tool used with the help of guideline two. I believe that frequent feedbacks between students and staff are improving the quality of courses.

It looks like I am able to stay on top of the schedule, if only just. I was not expecting that.

Week 2: Quality and evaluation

The presentation on Plick was very interesting and has given me more ideas for the subsequent parts of the course.
The only problem I have encountered with what is for me a new tool, is that it does not seem to be running on Firefox. Never mind; nothing is perfect.
So, the three questions to answer for this week are:
1. Why is evaluation important to you and how do you define it?
2. What sort of evaluations mentioned on the presentation are familiar to you already and why?
3. Why is quality important in eLearning?
Evaluation is important as a tool giving me feedback on how to improve my work. One aspect to this is the evaluation of the output from the students which in turn helps me to fine-tune my teaching.
But more important, it is needed at all stages of the teaching process, from creating the course to putting resources and material available to the students.
It is difficult to assess what sort of evaluations mentioned in the presentation are familiar to me; nothing came as a surprise. I think that any teacher or lecturer would use the different types mentioned to assess various aspects of a course or student progress.
Quality is much more important eLearning than in traditional teaching as you do not have the same interaction between the participants; I know when presenting a topic to a traditional class that someone is stuck on a concept by observing the class. Further clues appear when they are trying to apply the theory in the subsequent labs.
There are quality issues specific to eLearning, and they cannot be ignored in a context where there is a lot of pressure on staff in the New Zealand tertiary sector to deliver most courses using the blended or remote teaching format. It looks like it is too often considered a cost saving exercise, and the temptation is to deliver the eLearning course without paying attention to its specific challenges.
These are, but not limited to:
-the appropriate use of the specific tools.
-how to engage the students in a remote teaching environment
-how to provide support for these students
-how to conduct summative assessments and provide adequate formative assessments for these students.