The summer and start of fall term have been nonstop this year. I’m currently preparing for Educause 2006. I’m presenting a session on online course evaluations called “From Pencils to Pixels: Course Evaluations Go from Online Pilot to Production.” I’m also doing a poster session on moodle called “Moodle for the Masses: Deploying an Enterprise-Wide, Open-Source CMS.” I’m looking forward to connecting with others in Educause interested in these topics.
To Dallas!
With the end of term approaching, our faculty needed a way to read all of the posts in a forum without having to click into each discussion. They got used to this feature in Blackboard so I wrote a new view of a forum that accomplishes this. I made it part of our Augsburg moodle library. After you add a button to the standard forum view anyone can collect the posts — it also respects groups (at least in my testing of it).
I’ve added a new resource to my annotated bibliography on online course evaluations.
Norris, J., Conn, C. (2005). “Investigating strategies for increasing student response rates to online-delivered course evaluations.� Quarterly Review of Distance Education 2005; 6 (1) p13-32 (ProQuest document ID 975834871).
This paper reports the findings of 2 studies done at Northern Arizona State University. The first study looked at historic data from 2000-2002 to examine student responses to online course evaluations in 1108 course sections. This group had an average response rate of 31%. A follow-up questionnaire was sent to 50 faculty in the group to explore what strategies improved response rate. These results informed the second study on 39 online course sections and 21 sections of a required freshman face-to-face course. The second study used some basic strategies (no penalty strategies) in the implementation of the online course evaluations: 2 weeks before the end of the course the URL to evaluation was posted in the course management system, an announcement containing a statement of course evaluation value and due date was sent in a method appropriate to the class (email, online syllabus or discussion board), and a reminder email was sent 1 week before the class ended containing the URL and due date. The 39 online course sections averaged a 74% response rate and the 21 face-to-face courses averaged a 67% response rate. In addition, 11 sections of the face-to-face course used paper evaluations and received a 83% response rate. These suggestions are very similar to the emerging findings from the TLT Group’s BeTA project.
I whipped together a block for the new RPI interface to CourseEval3 (what we use for our course evaluations). You can find it on my moodle mods page. The RPI provides a data stream for the current user (in this case a javascript table) to external portals. I look forward to seeing if it improves our response rate in the winter trimester and spring semester. Our students are constantly going to moodle so it’s a logical place to put it.
I’m working my way through the latest Educause Quarterly. With a cover on e-learning, how could I pass it up?
First, there’s “Laptop Use in University Common Spaces.” At first I thought cynically, “oh, a survey to see if students are using laptops — they are!” But once I read it I saw they were interested in how students are using their laptops in these spaces. Of most interest was the need for power and secure storage. It’s amazing how many leave them unattended. The need for power is easy to miss — batteries don’t run forever!
Next is “E-Learning—A Financial and Strategic Perspective.” This well-researched article does a good job of hitting the key aspects of e-learning that impact the bottom line: use of adjuncts and overhead costs. It also hits on the concerns of faculty about the use of adjuncts, course development, and quality.
Following that thread is “Uniting Technology and Pedagogy: The Evolution of an Online Teaching Certification Course.” This article explains a model of certifying faculty to teach online using an online course — the faculty get to be online students. I think it provides a good framework for fulfilling this need — assuming you are able to invest in making the course as good as it needs to be. There are some good examples of the challenges the faculty faced when they were in the role of online student.
And lastly, “Professional Development for IT Leaders” gave me some things to think about along with “CIO Effectiveness in Higher Education.” Of course the former takes place in a large university with many different IT opportunities. But it makes me think what do I want to do? where do I want to go? do I want to move more into management and more distant from the end-users like faculty? Those questions won’t be answered today…..
Well, maybe not the future. But it is impressive. The more AJAX-driven Web 2.0 techologies (click on those if I’m making no sense) I see the more I want our academic web services to use them — thinking CMS/moodle here. Netvibes is just a fluid portal that I’d love to have for a campus portal. I’m still just amazed at how in a web browser I click and edit and move objects around — just like a desktop application. There have been some AJAX-based modules developed for moodle.