There is no doubt that some things are better taught in a traditional classroom environment and some are better taught in distance education environments. And, of course, many topics that can be taught well in either environment. In most cases it is far more important to consider the instructional design method used for the course than the medium of course delivery. If the instructional design fits properly you can make a good educational experience in many different subject areas.
One topic that is also talked about in the debate about distance education is the quality of the assessment strategies. Web technologies have made it very easy to create simple multiple choice and true/false assessments. Many people who deploy online learning (e-learning) simply transfer material from a lecture type class (or in a worst case scenario, simply put a bunch of written text online) and then offer a multiple choice test at the end. This is not always bad if you are just trying to get people to memorize information, but hopefully the goals for most educators go beyond simple rote memorization.
In his book, Educative Assessment, Grant Wiggins states that assessment should be more than just a means to attempt documentation of learning. The assessment should be a learning process in and of itself. When designing tests or evaluations, I have always tried to keep that in mind.
I have been spending the last several days working on a comprehensive evaluation for our orthopedic massage certification program. I have become intrigued with the possibilities of the adaptive mode for test questions that is built into Moodle, our learning management system. When a student takes the exam and answers a question correctly they can immediately see that they got the question correct. Immediate feedback like this helps reinforce the learning process. When a question is answered incorrectly there is an opportunity to do the question again for a lower amount of credit and, if desired, see feedback on why the question was wrong. This ability to get immediate feedback about errors has great potential for using the assessment process for enhancing learning and not just measuring it. That kind of immediate feedback and grading option is not possible in a paper-based classroom evaluation test.
There’s no doubt that immediate feedback in formative tests such as what you’re talking about is one of the real strengths of online learning environments.
Unfortunately our course development has been drastically underfunded which has meant that we often haven’t had the time to develop formative tests to support our students learning. On the upside, one of the great things about assynchronous elearning is that we should be able to add this functionality on this year.
By: davidmcquillan on December 4, 2008
at 6:14 pm
David:
Maybe your online component will also become a “blended learning” solution where it is a combination of using a traditional LMS for some of the more structured activities (like assessments) and the open, information gathering process for exploratory learning that you are creating.
By: Whitney Lowe on December 5, 2008
at 8:00 am