Literature Review

Teaching in a Web Based Distance Learning Environment:
An Evaluation Summary Based on Four Courses

The problem:
The Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University conducted an evaluation on four online courses offered by another university to provide criticism concerning strengths and areas where the university can focus efforts to improve its online courses.

Questions:
What are the key strengths of the four online courses offered by the university?
What are the areas of weaknesses of the four courses? And how to overcome them?

Methodology:
The evaluation was done on four online courses offered by another major university (which is not specified) other than Indiana University. The evaluation of the courses was based on the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (Chickering & Gamson 1987) and the human computer interface (HCI) designs evaluation was based on Consistency of web page layout and design, Clear organization and presentation of information, Consistent and easy to use web site navigation, aesthetically pleasing design and graphics. The evaluation was conducted by four doctoral students from the Center for Research on Learning and course evaluations were supervised by Prof. Thomas Duffy, in which each evaluator had the lead responsibility in evaluating one different course in terms of understanding the course from a learner’s perspective. The instruments used to do this were:

• Reading all of the course online materials available including the communication threads in the asynchronous conferencing forums
  
• Occasional meetings: throughout the evaluation process, the whole team would meet to exchange notes, discuss their analyses, and identify trends in the data.
  
• interviews: in three of the four cases, a couple of evaluators Interviewed the instructors in person in order to help answer some questions aroused during the evaluation process as well to understand the design and structure of the course from the instructor’s perspective.
  
  Results:
  The four courses strength points were in:
  
• Encouraging Active Learning: the four courses provided authentic real-world assignments.
  
• Encouraging Student-Faculty Contact: by encouraging students to contact them via email and phone.
  
• Respecting Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning: by encouraging students to convey their points of view in the courses in addition, they included learning exercises filled with real-life examples which represented varied perspectives.
  
  Areas that needed improvement in the four courses:
• Encouraging cooperation among students: the interaction between students seemed to some extent. It was recommended to follow the guidelines for asynchronous conferencing to help overcome this problem.
  
• Giving prompt feedback: the feedback became progressively delayed as the semester progressed. It was recommended to give feedback to students within a week of an assignment submission date.
  
• HCI Design: one course in particular required a lot of enhancements to the interface in order to make it more usable (user-friendly) for the students. In addition, the majority of courses could use some improvements in breaking up heavy text pages with appropriate formatting and images.

Some general recommendation for improving the online courses:

• The university should provide chances for and encourage instructors to share their practices and experiences with each other through faculty development workshops, seminars, etc. and offer awards and recognition for motivation.
  
• Instructors and students should be aware on the importance of asynchronous conferencing tools by using them more effectively in their courses.
  
• Encourage instructors to implement course management strategies that do not compromise the quality of the instruction.
  
• Give access to development resources to all School faculty members who are teaching online courses for decreasing their dependent on their own HTML coding skills to develop online materials.