Evaluations and other articles in JIHE

Just reading a bit this morning in the Journal of the Internet and Higher Education for this month - quite a few papers in the alert caught my eye. The article on peer-assessment is similar to what we do in Year 2 with students although they undertake a group presentation. I note that they stop short, as we do, of getting students to mark each other's work, as a tutor would. This is an understandably conservative route, but I was a little disappointed... I also noted from Owsten et al's lecture capture paper that it seemed to be most used by lower performing students, but in a way that I would decry. These students are viewing the entire lecture, whereas the higher performers were locating the chunks they wanted to access again. The paper does not really help us to know which way to read this relationship and it continues to bemuse me. Would the low-achievers become high-acheiver if only they could take a better approach to their studies..?

In the conclusion to Dziuban and Moskal's paper I found this:

The class for many contemporary students is an increasingly complex network of interactions. Recently in discussing generational difference a student said to the authors, “You will learn by reading a book or the manual. We will learn through interaction with each other and the Internet.” (Hartman, Dziuban, & Brophy-Ellison, 2007). If this is true, then end-of-course evaluations offer very little opportunity for interaction. Perhaps one should consider new instructional evaluation protocols that are not summative and after the fact, but instead those that are more reflective and interactive. The opportunity cost involved would require a much greater investment of time and resources, but good news is that such an approach would increase the student voice in their learning and support a more collaborative educational environment.

I had not read this kind of philosophical rationale for moving to a more formative style of evaluation, which is greatly underused IMHO. Our evaluation forms have recently been under review in the light of the National Student Survey questionnaire. But it begs the question whether we can really account for the kinds of learning experience students are experiencing at an individual level when so much of it happens almost as a co-incidence of their ability to make connections (of all kinds). It must be our role as designers of education to do what we can to assure the potential for students to do that... embracing formative evaluation must be part of that...

Dziuban, C., & Moskal, P. (2011). A course is a course is a course: Factor invariance in student evaluation of online, blended and face-to-face learning environments. The Internet and Higher Education, 14(4), 236-241. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.05.003

Do lecture capture systems promote connections?

Just returning from a presentation about a pilot in lecture capture using Echo360. In a traditional University setting, my hang-ups were:

• if the best this is is a revision aid, that's an expensive revision aid.
• if this would be useful for students who missed the lecture for some reason, cant they do what anyone else has ever done, get the summary or notes from a peer and do some reading around.
  
• £ for £ there is an almost infinitely greater value for lifelong learning in a simple reference list at the back of an appropriate journal article than there is in a recorded lecture. This also goes for other suggested uses, like recording a summary instead of the whole lecture or recording a 'pre-reading'
  
• if we are aiming at students' epistemic fluency, this only encourages them to rote learn - evidence the statistics that say the traffic sky-rockets at exam time.
• how does a recorded lecture encourage them along the cognitive apprenticeship road to mastery in the given discipline?
  
• if we want to keep ephemeral lecture speech lively, how much will knowing your every word is reified prevent you from doing things 'on the fly' that may afterwards seem unprofessional?
  
• limiting the potential audience to just our students (who login to blackboard - assuming they can!) is naff and old hat.
• what is a lecture good for anyway? If your lecture is the same every time then you probably shouldnt be giving it as a lecture. The students in a lecture have given ceded some level of pedagogic control over to you, they're giving their attention to what you have to show and say - will they do that at any other time (in competition with, for example, their chores or family/social time). I would not think anyone would want to review my lectures because they do not contain much raw 'content' - the objective is to stimulate them to think - for that limited time that they have volunteered their attention to what I have got to say...
  

If it was possible for students to interact by starting discussion threads at particular points in the lecture, that might have some promise in terms of promoting connections... but it isn't.
There is a clearer case for providing canned lectures to disparate distance students, but, even there, I would be feeling towards only making them available for a limited time.
Rant over.