RodeWorks

Our home-grown on line course evaluation system is having its second trial at the school, and again is working well.  I spent the end of last week in two days of PHP programming training offered by NYPHP.ORG.  The course was pretty good, and gave me all sorts of new ideas on how to re-write everything and make the system even more useful for the school.

I use my train ride back and forth to NYC to catch up on the many periodicals that I am subscribed to — look for a number of posts over the next week on various threads gleaned from this reading.  Campus Technology has a nice “top-ten” list on the subject of assessment:

Assess or Guess?: Campus Technology

Through my program of student at the Capella University Education program I’ve really caught the assessment “bug.”  And its a pretty tricky science, which may be why it is so often not done at all, or when done, done poorly.  In fact after reading Malcom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” I’m not sure we humans are ever really going to be sure what our motivations for doing things really are.  In this top ten list David Singer lists all sorts of issues that can make assessments misleading — From number 10: ‘Surveys do not accurately describe students’ real behaviors’ to number one’s: ‘Improvements in learning often cannot be attributed to the methodologies of technologies that are being investigated.’ 

Just because they are not perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them.  But we should treat the results with skepticism AND see them in a larger context.  For instance student course evaluations are OK, but why do we so rarely ask instructor’s to submit their evaluations of the course.  This could include a self-evaluation of their effectiveness, etc. and their overall evaluation of the student response.  Does the course have clear educational objectives and define what broad competencies students are expected to achieve?  And have these been assessed among other faculty/administrators/employers/professionals?   Is the course evaluation simple given to students because that is what is done?  Or does it exist to help start an ongoing conversation about what and how students are taught to best prepare them for their chosen area of study?  By themselves most course assessments are probably not worth much.  But as part of a broader, inclusive conversation they should be a valuable resource.