Weekend Summary for Week 7 – Evaluate

[Thomas Reeves]

Weekend Summary for Week 7 – Evaluate

At 4 PM Eastern Standard Time, it is nearly 20 Celsius and sunny where
Tom is in Athens, Georgia, and 2 Celsius and cloudy in London where
Yishay is. But all the hot action is occurring on the OLDS MOOC
website. Well that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there are some
excellent postings being shared there in relation to topics such as:

- evaluation experiences http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2864

- evaluation targets (decisions and questions):
http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2865

- evaluation planning http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2868

Identifying decisions that formative evaluation (or better
“developmental testing” as described by Diana Laurillard:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/olds-mooc-open/jR-foXarVYQ/discussion
) is probably the most difficult part of the evaluation planning
process. People, especially creative ones like most of the folks
involved in learning design, often need to be convinced of the value
of anticipating difficult decisions and asking the sometimes hard
questions associated with them, and then engaging in systematic
formative evaluation. There are many complexities involved in learning
design, and thus, straightforward or unambiguous answers to most
evaluation questions are rare. “It depends” and other conditional
statements are part of most of the evaluation results intended to
guide decision-making. Thorough evaluation planning can expose many of
these conditionals in advance, but it can be challenging to engage in
anticipating difficult decisions and hard questions without having the
design team members decide to abandon evaluation altogether.

The Academy Awards are being given out in Hollywood tonight, and we
like to give a couple of awards out too.
For "Best Draft Evaluation Plan," the award goes to Ida Brandão:
http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/8107
For "Best Blog Post," the award goes to Apostolos K. ("AK"):
http://idstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/week-7-evaluation-oldsmooc.html
Congratulations!

Now it is time to pick some of your anticipated decisions and the
questions aligned with them, and apply one of the recommended
evaluation methods to them. As described on the Week 7 webpage
http://www.olds.ac.uk/the-course/week-7-evaluate , we have identified
heuristic evaluation as one possibility, but expert review, learner
review, observations, focus groups, and other methods may be more
relevant in your particular project. We look forward to continuing to
help in this effort.

- Yishay and Tom, Sunday, 24 February 2013