Archive for the ‘Assessment’ Category

Exploring the Factors Associated with MOOC Engagement, Retention and the Wider Benefits for Learners

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have and continue to change the way in which non-traditional learners’ access education. Although the free element of these has been linked to low completion rates due to no invested interest, the MOOC platform enables innovative technologies and practices to be trialled. Therefore, rather than attributing varied intentions of learners […]

Assuring Quality in E-Learning Course Design: The Roadmap

Quality Assurance (QA) concepts and applications in Higher Education (HE) emerge from evolving meanings related to HE’s dynamic relationship with social, economic, cultural, and technological developments.  The latter has been redefined by the growth spurred by the forms distance and online education acquired during the last decades.  Creating a roadmap with clearly articulated meanings of […]

Emergent Evaluation: An initial Exploration of a Formative Framework for Evaluating Distance Learning Modules

Evaluation of student learning is becoming ever more important in higher education, partly because of increasingly performative structures within universities, and partly as the result of a developing interest in rolling development of curricula and teaching resources. Historically, for both face-to-face provision and distance learning, such evaluation has generally been captured by end-of-module questionnaires. Whilst […]

An Empirical Framework for ePortfolio Assessment

This research focuses on ePortfolio assessment strategies that yield important accountability and reporting information. Under foundational categories of reliability, validity, and fairness, we present methods of gathering evidence from ePortfolio scores and their relationship to demographic information (gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status) and criterion variables (admission tests and course grades) as a means for stakeholders […]

Portfolio, text, data, page

How Authors and Readers of ePortfolios Make Collaborative Meaning

This article reports on a case study, using a think-aloud approach (Boren & Ramey, 2000; Jaspers, Steen, van den Bos & Geenen, 2004; Kilsdonk et al., 2016), to investigate how different types of audiences interpret ePortfolios. During recorded viewing, students, instructors, and business professionals narrated their experience of reading two ePortfolios. Consistent with findings by […]

How to Select the Right E-Portfolio Platform

Electronic portfolio experts from colleges and universities across the country offer their key considerations for choosing a campuswide e-portfolio system. Campus Technology

Why Udacity and EdX Want to Trademark the Degrees of the Future—and What’s at Stake for Students

No one owns the term “master’s degree.” But upstart education providers dream of getting a lock on the words for the next generation of online graduate certifications. Their strategy says a lot about how today’s online programs differ from those in the past (Hint: duration and price are just one part of that). EduSurge

Online and Face-to-Face Language Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Oral Proficiency in Introductory Spanish

The primary resistance to online foreign language teaching often involves questions of spoken mastery of second language. In order to address this concern, this research comparatively assesses undergraduate students’ oral proficiency in online and face-to-face Spanish classes, while taking into account students’ previous second language experience. The sample consisted of 90 undergraduate students, both online […]

ePortfolio-Based Learning Environments: Recommendations for Effective Scaffolding of Reflective Thinking in Higher Education

In addition to providing a useful repository for learning products, ePortfolios provide enhanced opportunities for the development of advanced learning skills. It can be argued, however, that ePortfolios are not being implemented effectively towards fulfilling this important function. This paper presents an investigation of an ePortfolio environment that scaffolded the learning of pre-service teachers. The […]

Using ePortfolios to Assess Applied and Collaborative Learning and Academic Identity in a Summer Research Program for Community College Students

We evaluate the extent to which ePortfolios can be used to assess applied and collaborative learning and academic identity among community college students from underrepresented minority groups who participated in a summer research program. Thirty-eight students were evaluated by their research sponsor and two or three naïve faculty evaluators. Faculty sponsors evaluated students based on […]