Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

24 – Evaluating and Improving Your Online Teaching Effectiveness
Clearest point
This week’s topic—clear
Re: Clearest point
Information that was meaningful to me
…
Muddiest point
Re: Muddiest point
Re: Re: Muddiest point
Unclear on the concept
Re: Unclear on the concept
This week’s topic—unclear
Re: This week’s topic—unclear
…
Additional comments
Suggestion about reading
Good suggestion!
Re: Additional comments
Similar idea for reading assignment
Additional comments
This week’s topic—comments
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Figure 24.1 Example discussion forum
Instructor
Student A
Student H
Student B
…
Instructor
Student G
Instructor
Student K
Instructor
Student A
Instructor
…
Instructor
Student D
Student C
Student C
Student A
Student N
Student A
…
29 Feb – 23:57
01 Mar – 06:15
02 Mar – 14:34
04 Mar – 10:08
…
29 Feb – 23:59
01 Mar – 09:49
03 Mar – 20:10
02 Mar – 22:01
03 Mar – 20:22
04 Mar – 06:30
05 Mar – 19:38
…
01 Mar – 00:04
01 Mar – 07:51
01 Mar – 09:22
01 Mar – 09:15
04 Mar – 06:44
03 Mar – 13:55
04 Mar – 06:37
…
POLLING
There are various online polling tools that allow you to
get small amounts of feedback in a short time. Some of
these polling tools are built into LMS solutions, such as
Moodle’s Choice module, allowing instructors to ask
single questions related to the material, a course reading,
or instructional practice.
FOCUS GROUP
Ask a small group of students to join you once a month,
either physically (e.g., office hours) or virtually (e.g.,
chat, discussion forum). These could be the same students
for the entire term or a new group of students
each time. During your meeting, ask them specific
questions to determine information about learning objectives,
resources and how they are organized, online
activities, assessment strategies, amount of feedback, or
other aspects of your teaching that you want to improve.
Tip
The students are more likely to respond honestly if
their comments are anonymous. In this case, you
might assign someone from the small group to ask
the questions, another to keep track of time, and a
third person to take notes that they post as a group
or send by email. Most LMS chat tools do not allow
students to block the instructor from seeing the archive,
so you may have to disable the archive for that
chat, if possible. The note taker can copy and paste
the entire chat into a word processing document for
summarizing, editing, and removing student’s names.
Other options include telling the students to use a
free Instant Messenger (IM) service to hold the chat
session outside the online environment for the course.
MID-SEMESTER EVALUATION SURVEY
If you would prefer a larger scale approach than a focus
group, try a mid-semester survey. I have used different
tools, two of which allowed anonymous student responses,
but there are several more. Those that I have
used are called the Free Assessment Summary Tool
(FAST—http://www.getfast.ca) and survey tools within
LMS solutions, such as Blackboard’s Survey Manager,
WebCT’s Quiz and Survey module, and Moodle’s Survey
module or Questionnaire module.
While it is not perfect, I like FAST for several reasons:
• It is free.
• Anyone can use it to create surveys. It does not require
that your campus have a LMS.
Education for a Digital World 369