- Evaluation, as contrasted to research, is the systematic investigation of the worth or merit of an object. Program evaluation is the systematic investigation of the worth of an ongoing or continuing distance education activity.
- Measures of activity. These measures are counts of the numbers of events, people, and objects. Administrative records often provide data for activity questions.
- Measures of efficiency. Measures of efficiency are closely related to measures of activity, and often administrative records can be the source of efficiency information.
- Measures of outcomes. Measures of adequate learning are usually considered the most important measures of outcomes of distance education activities. Often, interviews with learners are used to supplement course grades in order to find students’ perceptions about a distance education activity.
- Measures of program aims. Some distance teaching programs specify their aims in terms of what and whom they intend to teach, and evaluation information is collected to establish the extent to which these aims were met.
- Measures of organizations. Sometimes it is important to evaluate a distance education institution in terms of its internal organization and procedures. Evaluators sometimes are asked to monitor the process of course development or program delivery to help an organization be more efficient.
- Accountability. Evaluators checked records, interviewed staff, and visited classrooms to determine the status of the development of the ICN, both as a physical system and as a tool used by teachers to deliver courses to distant learners. The accountability focus shifted during the project as its activities shifted from construction to implementation and finally to maintenance.
- Effectiveness. Evaluators conducted interviews and focus groups to determine what impact the availability of the ICN had on classroom education. Surveys were sent and reports were generated that helped education leaders to better understandwhat role distance education was playing.
- Impact. As the network became widely available and the number of courses and activities increased, it became possible to determine the impact of the ICN and distance education events on education in the state. Students were tested and grades reported.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Chapter 12: Evaluating Teaching and Learning at a Distance
Chapter 11: Managing and Leading a Distance Education Organization
- Distance Learning Leader is a visionary capable of action who guides an organization’s future, its vision, mission, goals, and objectives. The leader guides the organization and its people who have faith in the leader, and have a clear understanding and acceptance of the organization’s worthwhile and shared vision and goals. A distance learning leader has competence in knowing, designing, managing, leading, and visioning distanceeducation.
- Course Subsystem covers a much broader range of responsibility than the design and development of courses, although these are the primary functions.
- Student Subsystem is the processes of admitting students and managing and controlling their progress. These are broad generalizations; the issues are much more complicated. In practice, the quality of student support services available and easily accessible to a distant learner will play a major role in determining whether that student learns about the program, enrolls, and remains through to completion.
- Two Primary Functions for the logistical subsystem: purchasing and maintaining equipment, and employment and training of personnel.
- Distance Education Policy is policy development and implementation, as well as revision of existing institutional policies when appropriate, is an important topic to be addressed when an organization considers offering distance courses and programs.
- Intellectual Property Rights related to online courses and the media embedded within are a significant issue in distance education. The essential concerns are ownership of components of online courses and rights pertaining thereto. In other words, who actually owns an online course, or who owns the individual parts of an online course, and who has what rights to use what under what conditions?
- Work for Hire is at the heart of the intellectual property rights debate. Under work for hire, if an employee creates a work during the course of her or his employment, the copyright of the work normally belongs to the employer. The test of what constitutes a work for hire utilizes the principles of what is termed agency law.
- The Costs of Distance Education Distance education is expensive. The costs range from basic operation of the administrative office for distance education to faculty salaries to instructional design and technical support personnel to student support personnel to the delivery technology infrastructure. Personnel costs typically are the vast majority of the total budgets for distance education programs. The costs of delivering distance education and ensuring return of investment are foremost concerns of many distance education administrators.
- Data-gathering. The federal government tracks Internet access among the general population through studies reported in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Falling Through the Net reports. The National Center for Educational Statistics (2003) tracks trends in distance education in postsecondary institutions. The Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General also compiles information on state and accreditation agency controls over distance education programs.
- Digital Divide was defined by the Digital Divide Network (2004) as the gap between those who can effectively use new information and communication tools, such as the Internet, and those who cannot. The Digital Divide thus is a much broader concept than the relatively simple matter of access.
Chapter 10: Copyright and Distance Education
- Photographs and Digital Images The reproduction of photographs, illustrations, graphic designs, and other still images for use in a distance education course presents a perplexing copyright dilemma because intellectual property may be involved at several levels.
- Public Domain Any work in the public domain may be used freely in a distance education course. Works may enter the public domain several ways, most often simply through expiration of copyright protection.
- Videotapes and other Audiovisual Media works that consist of a series of related images which are intrinsically intended to be shown by the use of machines or devices such as projectors, viewers, or electronic equipment into courses transmitted to remote sites via distance education delivery systems, including both video- and Internet-based distribution.
- Section 110 of the copyright law permits the performance or display of a work during the face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, with a lawfully made or acquired copy (if applicable). This has become known as the “face-to-face teaching exemption”.
- Fair Use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement.
Copyright Myths
- Myth 1. A work has to be published and registered with the U.S. Copyright Office to receive copyright protection. Any work, published or unpublished, meeting the criteria specified in the copyright law receives protection as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression.
- Myth 2. If it does not have a copyright notice, it is public domain. As of March 1, 1989, when the United States adopted the Berne Convention international copyright treaty, a work is no longer required to include a copyright notice in order to receive protection.
- Myth 3. Anything on the Internet is public domain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Original works of authorship placed on the Internet are entitled to protection just like any other works meeting the law’s criteria.
- Myth 4. A work copyrighted in another country is public domain in the United States. This myth seems to arise when instructors want to use videotapes orpublications from another nation in a U.S. distance education course.
- Myth 5. The doctrine of “fair use” means that copyrighted materials can be used in an educational setting without permission. As a blanket statement, this is perhaps the biggest myth of all.
- Myth 6. Any copyrighted materials can be digitized and placed on a course Web site without permission, as long as the site is password protected. Recent legislation has expanded the scope of materials that may be digitized and placed on a password-protected course Web site, but fair use criteria still apply.
- Intellectual Property The matter of intellectual property (IP) rights is currently one of the hot buttons in distance education, particularly among faculty unions.
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been the most comprehensive revision of the 1976 copyright law to date, with far-reaching implications for distance educators. The Act was intended to bring the United States into compliance with two treaties agreed upon by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1996. The DMCA specifies that if a copyright infringement is found on a Web site maintained by a service provider, the rights holder may request that the service provider “take down” or block access to the infringing material and escape institutional liability for the infringement.
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/copyproj.html
Chapter 9: Assessment for Distance Education
- Authentic assessment refers to tasks that simulate real-world challenges. Ideally, the student is presented with the full array of expectations for a task and is expected to engage in activities that reflect a meaningful response.
- Performance-based assessment is expecting the learner to perform a skill. It may include determining what the learner knows about the skill itself, or focus on higher-order thinking and critical reasoning.
- Asynchronous Communication These flexible online utilities can be used to implement a wide variety of assessment activities.
- Synchronous Communication tools such as audio conferencing, online chat, or instant messaging provide a real-time dynamic for assessment that can offer instructors an immediate sense of how well students grasp the course content.
- Portfolios have a long history of use as summative assessment tools in fields such as graphic design, architecture, and marketing, but are gaining acceptance quickly for their value as formative compilations of work in a much broader range of disciplines. A portfolio might consist of a variety of materials (papers, videotapes, computer files, etc.) reflecting generalized learning across disciplines, or it might be a more specific gathering of content-based materials, such as tests, worksheets, or art projects.
- Problem-Based Activities This instructional approach has been used successfully in medical education for decades and is now being utilized in many other disciplines. Learners are presented with a case or scenario and are expected to analyze the situation and recommend a course of action.
- Journal Writing Students participating in field experiences or clinical rotations are frequently required to track their progress through journal writing, often in response to specific learning objectives or for accountability and accreditation purposes.
- Concept Maps graphical representations of concepts and how they’re related to one another, for assessing student learning is a relatively recent phenomenon.
- Problem-Based Activities This instructional approach has been used successfully in medical education for decades and is now being utilized in many other disciplines. Learners are presented with a case or scenario and are expected to analyze the situation and recommend a course of action.
- Plagiarism Clarifying precisely what constitutes plagiarism and having clear policies for dealing with it are two strategies suggested by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) (2003) for alleviating this problem. Instructors should also attempt to distinguish between plagiarism (i.e., the intent to claim as one’s own someone else’s words or ideas), and the simple misuse of sources, resulting from ignorance or carelessness.
- Cheating To a great extent, teachers assume that students are honest individuals. For example, few instructors in a face-to-face classroom environment would consider checking identification to verify that each person sitting in that room is, in fact, who they claim to be.
http://www.cast.org/udl/UniversalDesignforLearning361.cfm.
http://www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html.
Chapter 8: Support Materials and Visualization for Distance Education
- Size. Letter size is very closely related to legibility. Large, bold lettering is easier to see and read than is smaller lettering. Certainly lettering should not be smaller than 24 point (1/3 inch), and 32 to 36 point is preferable, especially if computer output is to be displayed on regular television monitors. Five words per line and five lines per page are a maximum for an ISG display or a screen of television information.
- Font. Sans serif fonts should be used instead of fonts with serifs, the thin extensions to letters often used in textbooks and printed documents. Serifs tend to be too fine for display on television. Bold fonts with thick stems display the best. Also, the same fonts should be used throughout a presentation, and no more than three different fonts should be used for any single display. Two font types work the best, when one is used for one category of information and the second is used for background or secondary information, for example. Fancy typefaces and italics should be avoided unless there is an overriding reason for using them.
- Color and contrast. Color is often misused in television. Colors should be bold and simple and should not be overdone. Some combinations, such as green and red, do not work well together. Avoid saturated colors like red. Use dark letters with a light background, or vice versa. Many television instructors like to usebright colors on a black background for displaying computer screens of information. This approach produces very readable displays.
- Alignment. Centering text for television display is not as effective as aligning text to the left. Left-justified text seems to be most legible.
- Capitalization. The literature on readability is quite clear that uppercase and lowercase lettering, rather than all uppercase or all lowercase, reads the best.
- Line is generally considered to be one-dimensional. Line has length but not width. Line portrays direction, presents objects, and defines the outer shape of something.
- Shape is used to symbolize objects or to show large or small spaces. Shapes have two dimensions, height and width. Space is either positive or negative. The outline of an object in a visualsignifies its positive space. The most common negative shape of something is its background.
- Texture is the perceived or actual roughness or smoothness of a surface. Texture is used to help define shape or space.
- Value is the degree of lightness or darkness of a surface. Value is accomplished through shading. Value shows changes in space, and is often used to create the illusion of volume or solidity in a graphic object.
- Color is related to value and is used to visualize an object realistically or to differentiate an object from another object. Colors have hue, value, and intensity. Hue describes a specific color, such as red, green, or blue. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color. Yellow has the highest value. Intensity is the strength of a color, such as bright yellow or dull red. Intensity is determined by the purity of a color.
Chapter 7 The Student and Distance Education
- Synchronous. Synchronous class time is similar to the on-campus, face-to-face arrangement familiar to many students. Students can go to a nearby site for a televised class or sit at home to participate in an audio conference or Web-based video conference.
- Asynchronous. In an asynchronous class, the class meeting time is a special issue. The fact that everyone does not have to be at the class at the same time is one of the advantages of this type of class for very busy people who are unable to rearrange their schedules.
- White Collar Workers access to distance learning is easier and more flexible
- Blue Collar Workers access to distance learning is more complicated.
- P12 Learners:
1. Young school age people
2. Usually not in distance learning by choice.
3. Common for the learners to be from all over the world and have various abilities.
4. Students often comfortable with navigating the web.
5. Presents unique instructional design requirements for the instructor. - Time for Class Synchronous: similar to seated on campus courses. Students may go to a particular place to watch a televised class or webinar. All class members participate at the same time.
- Classroom Culture: although distance learner students are generally characterized as independent learners, they still learn from collaborative experiences.
- Etiquette: all students will come into the course with a range of etiquette skills, it may be necessary to take a student "aside" and have a private conversation about appropriate etiquette.
- Prior Knowledge: an awareness of prior student knowledge. This can prevent boredom or frustration for my students.
- Learning Styles: understand the characteristics of the learners in class. It should allow students to share information about themselves and how they learn best.
prezi.com/.../chapter-7-the-student-and-distance-education
learnerassociates.net/learners/chap08.pdf
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Chapter 6: Teaching and Distance Education
- Faculty Issues. Faculty or labor-management—issues can easily be the most difficult for policy developers, especially if instructors are unionized.
- Compensation and Support. An issue that has been ongoing since the onset of distance education is related to faculty compensation.
- Qualifications. The qualifications of a distant instructor are not always articulated.
- Copyright. Copyright presents a complexity of issues within a distance education environment. It is imperative that the instructor and students understand the copyright laws and the institution’s policies.
- Creating the Learning Community. Creating a learning community involves both the instructor and the students. Everyone must take an active role in the development of a collegial learning situation. Students must understand their role in the progress of the learning experiences.
- Facilitating Active Learning Practices. Learners who are engaged in learning are actively participating in their own understanding of the content. The “kiss of death” for any distance course is the lack of student participation. Strategies for active learning range from giving students opportunities to think about a topic and respond to actual hands-on manipulation of learning objects.
- Instructional materials are an essential element to ensuring quality learning experiences. Media formats for instruction continue to advance with the development of newer technologies. The key to using quality instructional materials is that the appropriate media are selected. Instructional materials need to enhance the learning opportunities for students.
- Addressing Assessment. Students need to know how their participation in class discussions is measured. Students who are reluctant to engage in discussion or are unprepared should be ready to accept the consequences of nonparticipation if a portion of assessment depends on a certain level of participation.
- Compensation and Support. An issue that has been ongoing since the onset of distance education is related to faculty compensation. In many institutions, the expanse of distance education has not been recognized as additional work, but rather something that can easily be assumed within existing instructional expectations.
- Fiscal and Governance. The key issues in this area deal with tuition rates, special fees, full-time equivalencies, state-mandated regulations related to funding, service area limitations, out-of-district versus in-district relationships, consortia agreements, contracts with collaborating organizations, board oversight, administration cost, and tuition disbursement.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i44/44b00701.htm
http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewSym/mono2.html
Chapter 5: Instructional Design for Distance Education
- Systematic Process: The process of systematic planning for instruction is the outcome of many years of research (Dick, Carey, & Carey, 2004). An analysis of the application of this process indicates that when instruction is designed within a system, learning occurs. The process of instructional design is a field of study. Instructional design is considered the intellectual technique of the professional who is responsible for appropriate application of technology to the teaching and learning process.
- Analyze the General Abilities of the Class. Analysis of the cognitive abilities of the class allows the instructor to observe how students relate to the content of the lesson. Such issues as clearly defining the prerequisite knowledge or skills for the specific learning experience are important to ensure a successful learning experience. The students’ prior experience with similar types of cognitive tasks is important.
- Analyze Potential for Learner Interactivity. Students who are less social may find the distance education environment more comfortable for them. Students may become more expressive because of the perception of privacy and the informative nature of mediated communication. They may perceive the increased and varied interactivity and immediate feedback as a positive input to their interface with the learning experience.
- Understand Learner Characteristics. To be effective, it is necessary to understand the learners in the target audience. Willis (1994) suggested that the following questions should be asked prior to development of distance learning environments:
- What are students’ ages, cultural backgrounds, interests, and educational levels?
- What is the level of familiarity of the students with the instructional methods and technological delivery systems under consideration?
- How will the students apply the knowledge gained in the course, and how is this course sequenced with other courses?
- Can the class be categorized into several broad subgroups, each with different characteristics?
- Essential Content: The content of a course needs to reflect where this content relates to the rest of the curriculum. It is essential to examine the nature of the content, as well as the sequence of information. In any distance learning environment, one particular issue, that of time constraints, impacts other planning areas. Time constraints refer to the actual online time for delivery, which is often limited and inflexible.
- Media Selection. The common theme among these models is the learning context, which is the content, the intended outcome, and the nature of the students. Practical considerations such as available resources for creating media and the technologies for delivery of instruction also play a hand in the selection process.
- Visualizing Information. Visuals provide a concrete reference point for students, especially when they are engaged in a nontelevised learning experience. Even if the visuals are lists of concepts and ideas, they can help students. Visuals also help learners by simplifying information. Diagrams and charts often can make it easier to understand complex ideas. A visual that breaks down a complex idea into its components can show relationships that might be otherwise confusing to students.
- Learning Environment: Educators are familiar with classroom settings. They are comfortable with using the space available to enable learning to take place. It is when the classroom shifts into a distance learning setting that the environment often becomes a challenge to the instructor. Several important elements must be addressed within the distance learning environment.
- Course management systems (CMSs), also called learning management systems or virtual learning environments, are software systems designed to assist in the management of educational courses for students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. The systems can often track the learners’ progress.
- Resources. The second element to consider in the instructional environment is the resources available to students.
- What materials will they have at hand?
- What materials will be available in libraries and laboratories?
- Will students have access to resources for easy communication with the instructor?
http://www.itcnetwork.org/AccreditationEvidenceofQualityinDEPrograms.pdf
http://www.aln.org/effective/details5.asp?CE_ID=21
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