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.
As you look at the ideas presented within this article, it gives an entirely new perspective on ways to evaluate course effectiveness. By looking at a course from several different angles, you should get a better perspective on what is and is not occurring within the course. Most evaluations that I have experiences within the educational systems are either from an administrator’s perspective, where they are looking at how well a teacher performs on a given day or days while they are evaluating their teaching, or from a student’s perspective, where they are giving an end of course evaluation on what they thought of the overall course.
By looking at the overall school and how it is structured should give someone a better idea of what will and will not be expected from the students and the instructors. By looking at individual courses and how they are structured should also give an idea of what an instructor is expecting from their students and how they are teaching the course and working within the structure of the course. Asking the students for input on several different levels – not just their end of the course opinions – gives a better overview of how well the information is being retained and processed by the students.
When we look at any type of evaluation, we need to realize that there are several different facets to education and to every situation. By looking at several different pieces of the puzzle separately and then putting those pieces together to see the entire picture, should give us a better overall outlook as to what is occurring and how effective any online course and program really is.
Hew, K. F., Liu, S., Martinez, R., Bonk, C., & Lee, J-Y. (2004) Online Education Evaluation: What Should We Evaluate?