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* Blackboard CourseSites - http://www.blackboard.com/coursesites.html
* Blackboard Resources - http://resources.blackboard.com
* Blackboard Communities - http://communities.blackboard.com
Use:
A growing number of faculty are using the Internet to complement traditional
classroom-based courses. For instance, it is
not uncommon for course syllabi to be placed on the Web. Faculty also use
cyberspace to provide access to threaded
discussions, group activities, and quizzes for their on-campus students.
Time:
Internet-based education allows the teaching/learning process to occur
"at any time and any place." The ability to provide
asynchronous ineractive learning activities has become the signature characteristic
of this technology, setting it apart from
most of the other technologies. Not only does Internet-based instruction
allow the teacher and learner to communicate over
any distance to any place, it alters the concept of time. . . the term
"24/7" has become part of the lexicon of distance
education.
Evolution of Pedagogy:
Internet-based distance education is, in many ways, fundamentally different
than traditional classroom-based education.
Among other things, it is this distinctly different concept that engenders
concern and skepticism from many in the higher
education community. For some, though, it offers exciting new opportunities
to teach students, as evidenced by the
following observation from the League for Innovation in the Community College:
The beauty of the Web is that it provides an entirely new context for teaching
and learning. It removes the physical
and time constraints for instructors as well as learners. Moving a course
to the Web presents the perfect opportunity
to return to the core principles of teaching and learning to create a new
pedagogical model for our practices.
--Judith V. Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad, Faculty Guide for Moving Teaching
and Learning to the Web,
p.16
New Vision Worth Working Toward
-- Connected Education and Collaborative
Change (Part 1 of 4)
by Steven W. Gilbert, President, The TLT Group
Discuss
INTRODUCTION
In higher education, we do not need a vision of the perfect curriculum,
the perfect textbook, the perfect Web site,
the perfect classroom, the perfect campus, the perfect home
study, the perfect carrel, the perfect combination of
media. We need a vision of improvement and change – how to keep
moving forward, how to know when we’re
making mistakes, and how to correct them.
Teaching and learning are not problems that have solutions. They
are processes; they are fundamental modes of
human behavior and endeavor. People have been teaching and learning
longer than we can remember, and they
will continue long after we are gone. Teaching and learning
can be improved and we can and should continue to do
whatever we can to improve them – wherever, whenever, and however
we can.
The exciting discontinuity, the exciting opportunity and threat,
the exciting confusion now thrust upon us is an
explosion of new ways of organizing, communicating, delivering,
finding, modifying, and creating information. We
have barely begun to see how to use these new ways for teaching
and learning. It will take many decades to invent
and wring out the very best uses of these new tools – even as
newer tools continue to arrive, divert our attention,
and offer ever-greater possibilities.
We need a new kind of Vision Worth Working Toward -- a
vision that embraces change, sets a direction for the
integration of new applications of technology, makes the most
of the resources we’ve already got, and recognizes
how important it is to choose a future based on realistic analysis
of where we are, where we’ve been, and where
we want to go.
This series of articles concludes with the description of one
such vision, built on observations about the current
roles of teaching, learning, and technology in higher education,
and on predictions that extend and look beyond
those observations. That vision of Connected Education and Collaborative
Change is itself only a foundation upon
which more specific educational goals can be shaped and achieved
for an individual college or university. [Note:
This vision also has significant inter-institutional implications,
but they are beyond the scope of this paper. See also
the Glossary and Curriculum for Change files on the TLT Group
Web page.]
But first we must set aside some distracting visions: desperate
visions from those pressed too hard by changing
economics, mercantilistic visions from those who do not recognize
the depth and complexity of human nature, and
implausible visions from futurists who cannot see the present.
THREE UNWORTHY VISIONS
Desperate Futurists
Their hope: "Save money – reduce rising costs. Invest
in ‘pure’ distance education and other educational uses of
information technology to expand the school’s (college’s, university’s)
market for courses while lowering
cost-per-student. Use technology to increase the student-faculty
ratio while maintaining educational quality."
Savings found only in niche areas
These futurists are responding to the greatly increasing financial
and competitive pressures on many educational
institutions by grasping at an unrealistic hope of cutting overall
costs with technology. However, uses of technology
are increasing profitability (or decreasing losses) significantly
only in a few educational niches – those that have at
least one of the following characteristics:
1.New applications of technology and new media
can be used to offer instruction very efficiently; usually, for
"instrumental education" – focused
on very specific, easy to describe, knowledge and skills. (E.g., training
for
information technology maintenance.)
2.The learners are highly motivated and self-disciplined
-- usually older students whose job progress depends
directly and soon on their learning.
(E.g., company-required and subsidized training.)
3.The skills and certification are so valuable
in the current and foreseeable job market that tuition and fees can
be raised much higher than for
other kinds of learning. (E.g., executive MBA programs.)
Of course, there is always hope that new applications of technology
or new ways of integrating it into educational
practice may bring cost savings or additional revenue opportunities.
Such results are well worth pursuing, but they
do not often arrive easily, predictably, or without competition.
Most technology-based financial gains for traditional
educational institutions are more incremental and usually the
result of persistent efforts and the accumulation of
small changes, or the result of bold operational transformations
that usually require several years to plan and fully
implement (e.g., new integrated student and business information
systems).
continue to page 2
Studying and Improving the Use
of Technology to Support Collaborative
Learning
by Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D, Vice President and Director of the Flashlight
Program, The TLT Group
Discuss
Studying and Improving the Use of Technology to Support Collaborative
Learning:
An Illustration of Flashlight Methods and Tools
By Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D, Vice President and Director of the Flashlight Program, The TLT Group
Explanation
This essay describes how an institution might study and improve
the use of its technology to support and improve
collaborative learning and thus improve educational outcomes.
A study is being carried out by a team at
"Somewhere College." This article is part of a series that tells
the story of that study, from first discussion through
the process of focusing the study, developing research tools,
gathering data and analyzing findings.
In this article, a faculty member who is helping to lead the
study "reports" on the team's first three months of work.
The article begins with the early, casual conversations about
a need; its end includes a draft of the team's first
student survey and notes on the coming stages of the inquiry.
This article is a good way to see an example of the
kind of survey that can be created with Flashlight Online. It
also illustrates key Flashlight concepts such as "triad"
and "scenario."
P.S. Real studies don't progress in quite this "step by step"
process. But by oversimplifying a bit, we hope to make
the method itself a little easier to understand.
Collaborative Learning and its Discontents
I've been involved with the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)
Program here at Somewhere College. And my
courses have been using computers for student projects and email
for some years. So it wasn't surprising that
when people at our institution started to have more-than-casual
conversations about whether computing was really
helping education get better, I should be involved. We knew
that education was becoming different. We've had a
computer science major for a long time and courses in many other
departments teach content that is
computer-related: graphics courses in the arts, some of our
geography courses, statistics, and the rest. We have a
fledgling distance learning program, too. But that's not what
we were talking about. Was education any better
because of all this money and effort spent on technology?
I said it was important that I'd been involved with the WAC program.
I think that involvement is what it made it so
natural for me to speak up about computer-enabled changes in
teaching and learning practices "across the
curriculum." Writing across the curriculum got started partly
because folks had begun to notice that student writing
could actually deteriorate from sophomore to senior year. Writing
ability is something like a muscle. Engage in a
long term program of exercising and stretching: you get stronger.
Do one quick burst of exercising and then lay off
for three years: it's almost as though you'd never exercised
at all.
One difference between writing and physical exercise: one course's
worth of a writing-intensive course may not
make much visible difference in the writing of the average student
in that course. Progress is hard. But over lots of
such courses, the progress can be substantial.
So it didn't surprise me that neither I nor my colleagues, trapped
within our individual courses and unable to see
out, should be hopeful yet unable to show with certainty that
our graduates were more "educated" (in any sense of
that term) than they had been a decade earlier, let alone whether
computing was responsible for such an
improvement. We did know enough about what we and our colleagues
had done, and not done, to be aware that
the answer to "are they better educated because of our use of
computing" might well be "no."
Blob
Somewhere College has been gobbling too much technology too fast.
"Indigestion" is the result: the troubling
sense from students, from the administration, and from our own
observations that we are not getting full value from
all the hope, time, and cash we are investing in hardware, software,
and networking. It's gotten worse as the use of
electronic mail, "threaded conferencing," "chat rooms" and the
like have spread. Everyone is using technology but
in all the welter of newness, has anything really changed??
So about three months ago a few of us began talking seriously
about studying the situation in order to improve it.
Some of us were members of the institutional Education and Technology
Council (our version of a Teaching,
Learning, and Technology Roundtable). Eventually a small group
of us were put in touch with Gary Strong, director
of the Teaching and Learning Center who, it turns out, is quite
interested in technology issues too. He's our
institutional contact with the Flashlight Program and he created
authoring accounts for several of us with Flashlight
Online. He warned us, however, not to begin using it yet. "The
important thing is first to decide what you need to
study and improve," he said. "If you aren't focused, Flashlight
Online will just overwhelm you with possibilities."
Our real goal is to increase the value (and decrease the problems
) of using technology to improve learning
outcomes. Gary pointed out that computers are like paper: they're
both enabling technology. Adding paper doesn't
itself improve educational outcomes. The key to understanding
(and improving) outcomes is to study (and improve)
what people do with paper. "Same thing with computers," he said.
"Find an activity that is both
a. potentially very important for improving learning outcomes
for our graduates, and
b. potentially greatly improved by the ways students use technology."
We talked some about students working together, and generally
relating to one another, outside class. We talked
about student-faculty interaction, too, and students using information
resources (the library, not just the Web!). Many
of us have been concerned for a long time about the isolation
of our students. Many of us have also been worried
that our graduates aren't good enough at working in teams. Those
concerns are part of the reason why
"collaborative learning" was often one of the promises made
by those of us who have been arguing for more and
better computers and networking. We have been especially hopeful
that our commuting students would benefit
somehow.
But the sad truth is that we don't really know whether there
has been any general growth in collaboration or
community due to our use of computing and, if there has been,
we don't know whether it has produced any
perceptible, valuable change in what our graduates know, what
they can do, or what they value.
After about an hour of discussion with Gary, that's where our
group had progressed: it would be a good idea to use
Flashlight to study collaborative learning, the role of computers
in fostering it, and its impact on the quality of our
graduates - across the curriculum. Many of us were willing to
do some work on such a study. But how to get
started? Who should be involved?
Then one of my colleagues pointed out that we had a community
planning day coming up. Why not involve more
people? She went on:
"This study is probably going to find some bad news (maybe some
good news, too, but it won't all be good.) We
may well find that not as much collaboration is going on as
we'd hoped. If collaboration hasn't increased much yet,
we probably won't find any improvement in our graduates, either.
If that offends some of our colleagues, their first
response may well be to point out the flaws in our study. And
there certainly will be lots of flaws. And they'll ignore
the findings and they won't change what they're doing.
"We're willing to spend some time doing a study because we want
the findings to improve education here, not just
to report on it. OK - that implies that what we find has to
influence the choices that a hundred of our colleagues
make about how to teach. It may well need to influence other
kinds of decisions too: about services, about budgets.
But our colleagues won't make big changes like that unless the
study is about something that already worries them
and unless they've had a hand in how the study is designed.
(And even then some of them won't change!)
"So let's take a chance and involve lots of people right from
the start in choosing what's to be studied. If they're
worried about collaborative learning, too, they'll pick it.
If not, maybe we can agree on something else. But we ought
to focus our study on what worries most people the most."
Building a Base and Beginning to Focus: Community Planning Day
So we spent some time with the Education and Technology Council,
the Provost, and the steering committee for
the upcoming Community Planning Day. They bought the idea and
we began to make our preparations. We got
some useful ideas from Frank Parker, who'd done something similar
at his institution, Johnson C. Smith University
in North Carolina.
We began the Planning Day by having people respond in small groups
to The TLT Group's Fundamental
Questions. Then we asked them, "What educational opportunities
and problems are most important for us to study
and improve?" Everyone could suggest issues and they did.
People wrote issues on over a hundred little sheets of paper.
We tacked them onto a large wall chart. Then
everyone worked together to group them. Then we linked the groups,
took some votes, and generally got a sense
from that about which cluster of issues were most widely of
concern. "Collaboration and community" showed up on
top. We reaffirmed our decision to look at collaboration first
(partly because we weren't as sure how to measure
community). It was a great day, not just because of what we
learned but because so many people in our community
now had a personal involvement in deciding what issue was going
to be the subject of a real push in the next year
or two. (The evaluation we were planning was just one part of
this initiative.)
Gary told us that, in Flashlight jargon, this activity is sometimes
called scanning because it was our way of looking
across lots of potential triads before deciding where to focus.
Sometimes scanning is done with a survey or
interview program: looking for hints of unexpected success or
trouble.
Clients and Choices
Community Planning Day was about six weeks ago (as I write).
Our next step was to quickly convene an enlarged
study group that included some new folks who'd been especially
interested that day. When the study group met with
Gary, we talked again about the issue of using data to influence
collaboration. Whose choices were most
important? What choices? Faculty members would need one kind
of information. Technology support staff would
want some different data. There were other relevant decision-makers
too (Gary called them "clients.") The clients
are the people whose choices are to be directly influenced by
our findings. Since student-student collaboration is
very much about student choices, he urged us to consider whether
students should be our clients: were we trying to
use data to influence the choices they made about collaborating
and using technology to do it? Or was the data to
influence the people buying new communications technology, for
example? Or to influence potential donors to the
college? Or for the accreditors who would be visiting us in
a few years (showing them that we could use data to
improve our practices)?
We decided to make "faculty" and "technology service administrators"
our two major groups of clients while also
keeping our eyes on the kinds of data that might influence student
thinking about whether and how they should work
and learn in groups.
Refining the Study Team
Our group was too large to create the study directly, but we
also knew designing the study was more work than one
person could handle. We were going to design, administer and
analyze at least two surveys (students and faculty)
as well as doing some interviews. We wanted a study team that
was representative of our clients, too. We finally
got three people to volunteer to write the study (they'd be
checking with our larger group): a faculty member (me),
the associate director of academic technology, and a senior
in the education department. Gary has continued to
work with the team, too, to help us with Flashlight methods
and tools.
From Blob to Triad
By having identified "student-student collaboration" as a key
activity we were already most of the way to identifying
a triad (the activity; one or two key technologies that support
it; and a goal that the activity fosters). For this first
study, we narrowed further to the following triad:
Technology: The use of threaded
newsgroups on our Web course management system and associated use
of email
Activity: Students doing homework
together and helping each other in other ways outside the classroom
Outcomes: Bonding to one another
by graduation; increased retention to graduation; learning to work and
learn in teams.
The next step was to figure out how to measure those things.
How Well is the Triad Working?
We knew we needed to discover the answers to at least two questions:
a) whether available technology really is being used extensively
to help collaboration outside the classroom and
b) whether collaboration (technology-supported and not) is currently
helping to promote the outcomes.
In other words, how well is the triad working? If the answer
is "fine!" then we'd be done. If the answer is "it's not
working well (enough)" then we would need to gather more data
to help figure out what was blocking improvement..
Our Flashlight materials reminded us to think in terms of two
kinds of data: extant (data that's already available)
and new (data we have to create by surveys, interviews, developing
new measuring software, or whatever).
So we created the following table:
Extant data
New data
How much is the technology
being used for collaboration
outside the classroom?
How much collaboration is
going on outside the
classroom?
Evidence that graduates can
work in teams and feel a
sense of community.
If the data we gather in these areas make our clients happy about
the answers to our two basic questions, we
decided, we would have done enough; we'd probably just repeat
the study every year or so to track whether the
situation was improving, stable, or backsliding.
Here is how we filled in the table:
Extant data
New data
How much is the technology being
used for collaboration outside the
classroom?
We could use the course
management system to get some
crude numbers of how many
messages students were addressing
to the threaded discussions.
We could survey students and faculty
about how much the technology was
being used for this, how distinctively
useful it was (were there some kinds of
collaboration for which it was particularly
appropriate or inappropriate)
How much collaboration is going on
outside the classroom?
We couldn't think of any extant data.
We could survey students and faculty
about this, too.
Evidence that graduates can work
in teams and feel a sense of
community
Our school has bachelor's theses and
senior projects but students are
required to do these alone. One of the
suggestions from our community
planning day was to change that
requirement so, in a year, we'll have
some extant data about the quality of
this work. Not yet though.
We could ask faculty teaching seniors,
seniors, and recent alumni about
behaviors that reflect team skills and
community, as well as about whether
they feel that team skills and community
were important outcomes of their
education here. We could interview
employers of recent graduates about the
team skills of our recent alumni.
First Survey of Students (First Draft)
About two weeks ago (almost three months after our discussions
began) we started writing our first survey,
designed to gather a student-eye view of collaboration. It is
intended for use both in courses where faculty are
encouraging students to collaborate and ones where they don't,
and in courses where they encourage the use of
electronic communication and ones where they don't. We used
Flashlight Online to create it. You can see it (and
respond if you like).
At the time I am writing this draft, we have not yet begun drafting
the faculty survey but it will be similar to the student
survey: each group is being asked for its point of view on the
same issues. Also, we have not yet started drafting a
telephone interview guide for talking with graduates and supervisors
at employers and grad schools where many of
our graduates go; the interview would ask about the graduates'
skills for working in organizations and teams.
SCENARIOS OF FAILURE AND SUCCESS
Even though our student survey is not yet complete, we began
a few days ago to work on the first steps toward the
second round of our inquiry: data that could help faculty and
staff improve collaboration outside the classroom.
Gary started us off by pointing out that in some classes our
triad is probably working superlatively. In others it might
be completed blocked. Why? The difference usually lies in the
context. Some classes get students who love to
collaborate, while others get students who distrust it. Some
classes have lots of students who are good with the
technology, while others get students who don't know how to
use a mouse. And so on. If people knew such facts in
time, they'd be in a better position to help students use technology
to collaborate. "Everyone has gotten so used to
flying blind they're not always conscious of it. But they are.
A study can help guide action in the same way that
headlights can help drivers drive more safely at night: by helping
them spot problems and opportunities in time."
At Gary's suggestion, we started with failure scenarios: stories
about the kinds of context that can hinder or block
use of technology for collaboration. It's amazing how many different
scenarios we could imagine! Our initial list is
appended, along with the beginning of a "score sheet" we're
using to select which scenarios are most important to
use in designing our second set of surveys and other tools of
inquiry (e.g., questions to ask of students during small
group interviews) that could help us detect problems and opportunities.
Perhaps the most important finding from the 90 minutes we have
spent on scenarios was an "aha!" that occurred
toward the end of our discussion. Most factors affecting the
value of technology for collaborative learning do not
directly relate to technology. They are the factors that block
or encourage people to collaborate. If people don't want
to collaborate, or can't, the technology is of no value. If,
on the other hand, they are hungry to collaborate and are
good at it, the very same technology can be of enormous educational
value. If we had tried to evaluate the
technology just by studying the technology, we'd have missed
much of what was actually going on.
What's the bottom line so far? I've got some bad news and some
good news. The bad news: it took us almost three
months of hard work before we could even start writing our first
survey. The good news: by spending that effort up
front to decide how to focus the inquiry, it seems likely that
the study itself will be easier and (more important) the
study itself already has begun to influence what faculty and
staff are doing. And we haven't even gathered any data
yet.
Scenario Rating Chart
Scenario
a.Unlikely
[SCE1]
(0,1)
b. Data
required
[SCE2]
(0-2)
c.Import
[SCE3] (0-2)
Score
(a x b x
c)
Faculty unwilling to assign collaborative
assignments because too time-consuming to
help students work in teams. Too much time
required for coverage.
1
1
1[SCE4]
1
Faculty unwilling to assign collaborative
projects that are too open-ended, difficult to
grade fairly and quickly in the time available
1
1
1
1
Students believe that collaboration with peers
is cheating
1
2
2
4
Students believe that the teacher is the only
source of legitimate knowledge
1
2
2
4
Students have trouble with details of
technology (e.g., file transfer)
1
2
2
4
One incoming student is a sociopath who
destroys not only his or her own group, but
also is likely to disrupt the whole class
0
2
2
0
Students don't have access to computer
and/or connectivity at times and places when
they would work on homework
1
2
2
4
Students feel that interaction via computer is
too impersonal
1
2
1
2
Students find it too difficult or irritating to work
on homework via telecommunications
1
2
1
2
Students become irritated when peers
"freeload" and can't cope
1
2
2
4
Students' writing skills are inadequate for
collaborating this way
Students think the course itself is boring and
so aren't interested in working on such
projects; just want a grade and to get out
Student doesn't get along with team mates
and can't change teams easily enough
Student lacks skill to work in teams and
complete projects (e.g., time management for
team; give and accept critique; tendency to
bully)
Students too distractible, especially by Web
and chat rooms
Students lack the skill or patience to manage
the threaded discussion, which thus becomes
anarchic
Faculty member deluged with e-mail and burns
out
Student deluged with e-mail and burns out
Faculty member doesn't notice that some
students are going silent until too many have
become alienated
Students are all waiting for someone else to
talk, take the lead; silence seems safest,
easiest
Grading policy seems to favor individual work,
not team work
Student abilities too varied for teams to work
well in current organization of course
Students could interact better if they could see
each other, even just once or twice
Too many students don't pay attention to, or
understand, the directions on how to use
technology
Student projects get too wrapped up in
technology and thus many are content poor;
faculty decide to drop it
Students have no (electronic) venue to talk
about anything other than their projects
Students find it difficult to bond or form a
shared culture when they can't see each other
Students aren't mature enough or familiar
enough with content to work on open-ended
projects with no "right answer".
Students don't believe that learning the skill of
working in teams is important
Web host and e-mail system are too unreliable
or overloaded; prevents students from doing
projects on time
Web system can't handle the special needs of
homework projects in this course (math
characters, foreign language, images, audio,
video)
Screens are too hard to read for the demands
of this homework
Technology support not doing good/enough
training of students in using the software
Some students have only hardware that is
inadequate to handle the system fast enough
or well enough
[SCE1]: If the scenario seems at all likely (in twenty cases,
it might well happen at least once), then it gets a score of "1"; if it's
less
likely than that, it gets a score of zero, which makes the total
score for that scenario zero.
[SCE2] Data required. A score of 2 means that data can reveal
both the existence of a situation and useful nuances about it. A score
of
1 means that data would be of some use. A score of 0 means data
would be of no use.
[SCE3] Import=Importance. If this were happening, how important
would it be to know in time? (2= very important improvements could be
made if data were available, 1=useful improvements might be
made. 0= even if we knew, probably nothing could be done.)
[SCE4] A score of "1", not "0", was assigned because this information
could be used to plan a faculty development program if many
faculty members fit this description.
© The TLT Group, 2000
-----------
About the Author:
Steve Ehrmann is one of the founders of The TLT Group, serving
as Vice President and Director of the Flashlight
Program. For almost twenty-five years, he has been helping educators
improve teaching and learning. For
example, since 1993, he has directed the Flashlight Program,
which helps educators evaluate and improve their
own uses of technology, on- and off-campus. Flashlight may be
best known for its award-winning tools for
developing evaluative studies. Steve Ehrmann is also well-known
in the field of distance education, dating back to
his years of funding innovative research and materials in this
field when he served as a program officer with the
Annenberg/CPB Project. He has written or helped to write four
books and over thirty articles in this field, on
subjects as varied as the economics of courseware and the role
of designing in the curriculum. Many of his articles
can be found in the Resources section of The TLT Group's Web
site, under "Flashlight" and "Visions."
His Ph.D. is in management and higher education from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, from which he
also received bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering and
in urban planning.
-----------
This resource was brought to you by The TLT Group. Please visit
The TLT Group Web site to learn more about
their services. To continue reading about this and many other
issues related to teaching and learning with
technology, subscribe to Steven W. Gilbert's moderated listserv,
AAHESGIT.
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Institutional Support Benchmarks
A documented technology that includes electronic
security measures (i.e., password
protection, encryption, back-up systems) is
in place and operational to ensure both quality
standards and the integrity and validity of
information.
The reliability of the technology delivery
system is as failsafe as possible.
A centralized system provides support for
building and maintaining the distance education
infrastructure.
Course Development Benchmarks
Guidelines regarding minimum standards are
used for course development, design, and
delivery, while learning outcomes -- not the
availability of existing technology -- determine the
technology being used to deliver the course
content.
Instructional materials are reviewed periodically
to ensure they meet program standards.
Courses are designed to require students to
engage themselves in analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation as part of their course and program
requirements.
Course Structure Benchmarks
Before starting an online program, students
are advised about the program to determine:
if they possess
the self-motivation and commitment to learn at a distance
if they have
access to the minimal technology required by the course design
Students are provided with supplemental course
information that outlines course objectives,
concepts, and ideas, and learning outcomes
for each course are summarized in a clearly
written, straightforward statement.
Students have access to sufficient library
resources that may include a "virtual library"
accessible through the World Wide Web.
Faculty and students agree upon expectations
regarding times for student assignment
completion and faculty response.
Student Support Benchmarks
Students receive information about programs,
including admission requirements, tuition and
fees, books and supplies, technical and proctoring
requirements, and student support
services.
Students are provided with hands-on training
and information to aid them in securing material
through electronic databases, interlibrary
loans, government archives, news services, and
other sources.
Throughout the duration of the course/program,
students have access to technical assistance,
including detailed instructions regarding
the electronic media used, practice sessions prior to
the beginning of the course, and convenient
access to technical support staff.
Questions directed to student service personnel
are answered accurately and quickly, with a
structured system in place to address student
complaints.
Faculty Support Benchmarks
Technical assistance in course development
is available to faculty, who are encouraged to use
it.
Faculty members are assisted in the transition
from classroom teaching to online instruction
and are assessed during the process.
Instructor training and assistance, including
peer mentoring, continues through the progression
of the online course.
Faculty members are provided with written
resources to deal with the issues arising from
student use of electronically-accessed data.
For example, University of Illinois Online provides links to standards
of
course development, instructional technology support services, and
examples
of courses with web-based learning materials.
Evaluation and Assessment Benchmarks
The program's educational effectiveness and
teaching/learning process is assessed through an
evaluation process that uses several methods
and applies specific standards.
Data on enrollment, costs, and successful/innovative
uses of technology are used to evaluate
program effectiveness.
Intended learning outcomes are reviewed
regularly to ensure clarity, utility, and
appropriateness.
For example, University of Illinois Online has an informational page
about
the program which consists of a Steering Committee and an adminstrative
staff who monitor the online program. Links to reports and evaluations
are
provided.
