Week 6 Articles

Title: A New Methodology for Evaluation: the Pedagogical Rating of Online Courses

Bibliography: Sonwalkar, Nishikant (December 21, 2001). A New Methodology for Evaluation: The Pedagogical Rating of Online Courses. Campus Magazine, Retrieved April 6, 2007, from http://campustechnology.com/articles/38946/

Summary:

In this article Mr. Sonwalkar looks to provide a model that can be used to objectively assess online courses. He acknowledges the fact that online learning allows individuals to take advantage of asynchronous learning, but he feels it is difficult to evaluate the quality of the online course. He feels there is a need for such a tool as there are more than 1,000 corporate universities and online providers offering online courses. He introduces the “learning cube.” The learning cube looks to measure five functional learning styles, six media elements and the interactive aspects of learning. The five functional learning styles include: apprenticeship, incidental, inductive, deductive, and discovery. The six media elements include text, graphics, audio, video, animation, and simulation. Next he proposes a mathematical equation for measuring each element in the learning cube. Next he mentions that the “pedagogy effectiveness index.” This measure the richness of the course yet her feel there are several other factors needing to be measured to truly assess the effectiveness of the online course. These include content, learning, delivery support, usability, and technological factors. He also provides the reader with a summative evaluation instrument for rating online courses. He suggests using both the Pedagogy Effectiveness Index and the Summative Rating Score to assess the Overall Rating of the online course. Therefore, he concludes that Overall Rating = Pedagogy Effectiveness Index X Summative Rating Score.

Reaction:

I thought this article was well written and full of rich information. I believe Mr. Sonwalkar has done what he set out to do; he has created “[an] objective criteria for evaluating the quality of online courses based on the existing elements that represent pedagogical content (paragraph four).” His presentation of the elements in such a linier fashion made it easy for me to follow his logic in evaluating online courses. The fact that this process was very analytical made it very easy for me to comprehend. These tools can be easily applied to measure course effectiveness.

Title: Mitigating Conflict in Online Student Teams.

Bibliography: Dool, Richard. Mitigating Conflict in Online Student Teams. (2007). eLearn Magazine. Retrieved May 16, 2007 from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=36-1.

Summary:

This article was written by a professor that facilitates online courses. He starts the article by explaining that when online students are asked to work as part of a team they aren’t usually overly excited about the idea. That is they don’t like having other people’s actions or lack of action influence their grades. However, he defends his choice of making students complete group work as he sees it as a necessary job skill. He defines several student roles that become apparent in a group. First he talks about the “Martyr.” Students in this role are quick to point out that they have done much more of the work than everyone else on the team because the other team members don’t take their role seriously. Next he addressed students that take the “Excuse-meister” role. He states that these students have a lot of creative energy, but they usually use the energy to get others in the group to do their work. The students that take on the “Breathless in insert name of city here” role tend to cry wolf, but Mr. Dool suggests using these students as an early warning system that there is trouble in the group. Lastly, there are students that take the “Silent Partner” role. These students stay silent and don’t participate in the group much but of course want the same grade as other group members. He notes that the “Silent Partner” is the number one source of conflict in the team projects. The second biggest source of conflict in group work seems to be quality. Some students are unhappy about the quality of work submitted by other group members. The third biggest complaint about group works is accusations of plagiarism.

The author then moves the conversation of the article to cover the topic of setting the stage for group work. He posts articles early on in the quarter about team work and member roles. He also clearly defines in the course syllabus the purpose and the expectation of the team assignment. He also addresses the issue of plagiarism and academic integrity. The next tool he addresses is the team charter. This is the first deliverable he expects from the teams. The team charter is based on a template he provides. The template includes role assignment, skills inventory, contact and meeting information, and the process to mange conflict within the team. His experience has been that if he, the instructor, assigns the teams there seems to be less conflict. As far as instructor participation after the teams are formed he feels his role shifts to monitoring and encouraging. He utilizes virtual team rooms and asks that the team use this space for their work. This allows the instructor to monitor the team. He does ask if the team utilizes email for communicating that they please copy him on the message. These strategies seem to keep most of the work out in the open where he can monitor the team's work.

Next the author addresses some interventions. He has three; soft, hard, and shock & awe. The soft interventions are gentle reminders that teams should try to work out conflict on their own. Implementing hard interventions includes him making specific recommendations to help resolve the team’s conflict. When it comes to shock & awe, he implements a live conference call, and he becomes much more direct about how the team will operate and overcome this conflict.

So how does one grade group assignments? He does not suggest implementing a one grade fits all system. Instead he utilizes a team evaluation method. In this method the team members are areas to asses their own and their teammates’ contribution to the assignment.

While the instructor admits it is an increased workload to implement these suggestions, it has been his experience that by implementing these suggestions the team conflict in his classes has been reduced by 70 percent.

Reaction:

This article was great. Thanks, Gayle, for sharing it. I agree that as we prepare students for the work world, they must be able to function in a team environment. I think there may be more student roles than those he discussed, but generally speaking he hit the problem areas as he defined the roles in the article. I was a bit troubled by his use of only the masculine pronoun. I began to fear that only men enrolled in his courses; I don’t think this is a fact, but he makes no mention of she when describing students.

I am familiar with the team charter concept in that I used in while completing my undergraduate program. While developing the charter, the teams can really look at skills of individual members and this increases peer to peer learning. That is to say if we had someone in our group who was not a strong power point user, we would partner that person with someone that did have that as a strong skill.

Overall, I think the author offered very good advice and many helpful suggestions if we choose to engage our online classes in group work.