Online Education Evaluation: What Should We Evaluate?
The main point of this article is three different levels of assessment within online courses and education. The three levels are macro-level, meso-level, and micro-level. The authors discuss several different issues at each of these levels of evaluation.
The macro-level is referring to the entire online program. They are looking at the whole not individual pieces of the programs. They believe that such evaluation is important for several purposes. These purposes are justifying the investment of resources, measuring progress toward program objectives, measuring issues of quality and effectiveness, providing a basis for improvement, and informing institutional strategic planning and decision making (Hew et all (2004) 244).
The meso-level is evaluating the individual courses within the entire online program. After looking at several different studies, they authors have came up with ten key questions to help with the online evaluation of the courses. Some of these questions include ideas about what the courses encourage, what are the evaluation methods within the courses, and what type of feedback the students are receiving within the course.
The micro-level is evaluating the individual learners. As they are evaluating the learners they are looking at three different areas. These areas are the learner’s perception of the course, the learner’s process within the course, and the learner’s product within the course. By looking at these different areas within each learner’s experience they believe they will receive better feedback that they can glean information from to better evaluate the courses.
Hew, K. F., Liu, S., Martinez, R., Bonk, C., & Lee, J-Y. (2004) Online Education Evaluation: What Should We Evaluate?