Evaluation for Distance Educators

Sorry readers, no creative title this week. WYSIWYG.

CONTEXT:
The article was written from by the Engineering Outreach at University of Idaho. Granted it is a semi-dated article. The most recent reference used were from 1993, however, I did not know that jumping into the article; so it skewed my view of the overall effectiveness of the article.

CONTENT:
The article discusses several effective methods of evaluating distance education. The article first states that informal evaluations are at a near complete loss for distance education due to the fact there is no face-to-face contact which would breed convenient opportunities for teachers to answer student questions in a traditional classroom setting. However, informal evaluations are not completely lost from distance education.

Instructors can effectively implement informal evaluations using formative techniques coupled with qualitative questions and feedback. This might be the most effective way to receive feed back for the course due to the fact that summative evaluations come at the end of the course and wouldn't make any difference for those who just conquered the course. As well, quantitative feedback takes time to gather and most students finished with the course do not spend time evaluating the courses effectiveness or implement changes after the fact.

Some of the evaluation methods were a bit outdated calling for teachers to send out pre-post marked envelopes or for students to send in weekly postcard evaluations. I suppose that was the thing to do in 1993. E-Mail applications and other platforms like WEB CT, Moodle, or Blackboard has significantly increased teacher-student contact.