Summative Evaluations
Last week on the MOOC Research Google Group the following post came up by Alan Selig (reproduced here with permission):
While I don't have the time right now for an immediate answer, I intend on coming back to this later on this week. I also wanted to get it out there because I think that some form of evaluation is important - both learner assessments if you are accrediting people in your course and course assessments to make sure goals were realized. I am interested in what other people think about this issue :-)
I just got around to listening to the presentation by Tony Bates. Toward the end Stephen made reference to the surveys that many institutions give to students at the point of graduation. Not surprisingly these are usually very favorable, as the respondents have self-selected according to their favorable feelings toward the school.
It made me wonder (again) how we get evaluations in a MOOC from those who only participate at certain points in the overall schedule. Especially since we want to affirm that sporadic or episodic participation is a successful approach to MOOCs, how do we get summative evaluations when the end point for an individual participant can be anywhere during the course of a MOOC, or event beyond the official end of it?
While I don't have the time right now for an immediate answer, I intend on coming back to this later on this week. I also wanted to get it out there because I think that some form of evaluation is important - both learner assessments if you are accrediting people in your course and course assessments to make sure goals were realized. I am interested in what other people think about this issue :-)
