EDTECH 522 Module 2 Reflection: Evaluating Courses

Here is the Canvas Intro evaluation I did for an internal course used at my school. Here is the Creating a Linked In Profile course evaluation I also did as part of this assignment.

I gained knowledge in evaluating more concretely about learning objectives, assessment and instructional materials and how they interact. Correspondingly, I think this evaluation process will affect my course design in the future. For instance, in the Canvas course that a coworker in edtech at my school had created, the learning objectives are fairly clear, the assessments are ok, and the overall instructional materials are intact and relatively high quality. For our needs, the approach taken is probably appropriate and what we needed. Part of the reasoning is he did not have unlimited time to create this course, and so took the appropriate time in certain ways to build it out so learning could occur, and took some reasonable short cuts elsewhere that did not impact student learning results.

As I thought about this, what’s interesting is how the learning objectives, assessment, and instructional materials can vary from course to course. For instance, in some courses, defining and executing REALLY high quality assessment may be the critical component for student learning and success.  That holds true about the instructional materials as well - it is hard to envision a successful learning result if the instructional materials are low quality. In another course, if the objectives are not stated clearly, that can negatively influence the result of the learning.

The point is, depending upon the subject matter, the intended students, the time frame to create (or take) the course, whether it’s self paced or not, etc. can impact the ‘priority’ and relative importance of any of the evaluation criteria. In one course, excellent assessment may be paramount, in others, it’s all about the instructional materials, and so on. As said, it is hard to to envision a course that would have high quality student learning results that did not have excellent instructional materials.

If I were to pick one category that is the minimum area, it would be instructional materials. If I were to describe  a minimum of areas to evaluate, it would be the clarity of learning objectives, high quality and relevant assessment and high quality, engaging instructional materials.  In reality, all of the items in the checklist would need to, at some level, be evaluated, I believe. In my case, there was not a need - right now - for accessibility considerations, but who is to say when we might have an individual on staff who does need that extra capability to successfully navigate the course.

While both courses were generally high quality, I was impressed by the 3rd party course I evaluated - there was more introductory material included, which was appropriate for that course. In addition, I felt that the design overall was a bit more robust. That does make sense since it is a course available to the 'outside', as opposed to the course created internally here at my school.

Finally, one bit of additional learning - gained from the “How to build a Linked In Profile” course - was to include an FAQ section. This did a good job of getting ‘out of the way’ some of the more common questions in one section.