During 2006 the IoE used the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund in order to fund four e-learning projects designed to support the development of the provision of flexible teaching in accordance with the Learning and Teaching Strategy. These four projects as a whole set out to generate a set of practical tools and resources to support a faster and more coherent integration of technology in teaching and learning activities.

This document is the outcome of one of these projects - ‘Evaluation Resources’ – and it provides a review of evaluation resources available for practitioners which are applicable to online and mixed-mode courses1. The main objective of this report is to provide an overview of practical evaluation resources for IoE academics who are currently using technology in their courses so as to facilitate the integration of evaluative practices into e-learning courses.

These resources do not cover the full range of evaluation possibilities, but do provide an overview of some of the distinctive ways in which it is possible to evaluate e-learning courses. The Summary of Recommendations sets out the main recommendations, the main body of the report provides an expanded account of those recommendations, and then the appendices provide a review of existing evaluation tools, resources and approaches together with a number of exemplars which can be used as a basis for developing specific approaches. The main emphasis of this report is on providing support for tutors looking to evaluate their own on-going courses. Some of the tools and approaches described in the appendices go a little wider than this and are intended to support evaluations of materials and approaches in a more general way, and these are provided as a source of ideas and inspiration rather than as models to emulate in course evaluation.

 evaluation_of_online_courses 1.13 Mb