Evaluate Distance Education - Not A Hanging Judge

Our readings this week for InsT 6105 were regarding Evaluaton of Distance Education. I was particularly stimulated in thought by two of the articles, "Evaluation and Distance Education: Five Steps", by Michael Simonson, and "Evaluation for Distance Education, guide 4", from the University of Idaho, College of Engineering, Engineering Outreach. Both gave very good ways to effectively evaluate DE courses. They teach ways that are similar to the ways we evaluate students in class, which is a good way to evaluate the effectiveness of the class. I particularly liked the U of I brief, it is compact and related to my field.

I teach classes that prepare students for fields in engineering, so it caught my interest right away. I have seen very little of quality and value in distance education that develops engineering skills and leads to ABET accredited degrees. I like very much the quick breakdowns of what instructors DO NOT have in a DE setting as compared to the traditional classroom, yet how to compensate for this in evaluative adaptations. The coverage of effective types of formative, summative and combined evaluations was particularly informative as related to engineering type classes, but also others. The comments about quantitative and qualitative evaluation were very to-the-point. And the discussion of What to Evaluate was great. It formed a great parallel of how we should define the effectiveness of a DE course and what we should be doing in the deliverable content of the course, what we should think of as truly being effective. So many evaluation of classes and instructors and students (and life) try so hard to define things in terms of "measurable outcomes" but make up the measuring tools they use (my son gave me a quote, politician source unknown, that says, "There are 3 kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies and statistics").
Because of the great amount of useful information and key helps in evaluating DE classes this provided in just two pages, summing up what many others have said and studied in many pages and volumes, I will keep this close in my evaluation of classes and the DE products I help deliver and 'eye'.