|
Flashlight Evaluation
Handbook - Table of Contents
These materials are for use only by
institutions that subscribe to The TLT Group, to
participants in TLT Group workshops that feature this
particular material, and to invited guests. The TLT Group is
a non-profit whose existence is made possible by
subscription and registration fees. if you or your
institution are not yet among
our subscribers,
we invite you to
join us,
use these materials, help us continue to improve them, and,
through your subscription, help us develop new materials!
If you have questions about your rights to use, adapt or
share these materials, please ask us (info @ tltgroup.org).
Accreditation self-studies and program
reviews are hard work, time-consuming and expensive.
Unfortunately, they're also often seen as an external
imposition and a waste.
But such self-studies can often be turned
into an opportunity to gather the kinds of evidence that can
leverage improvement in teaching and learning with
technology (TLT). That's even more feasible when accreditors encourage
programs and institutions to craft focused self-studies that
are designed to both illuminate and improve education.
Our approach to the design of
self-studies is shaped by the Flashlight Approach (click
here to take a look at these principles.)
-
Why Focus on Teaching and Learning with Technology
(TLT)?
-
Choosing Outcomes and Activities for Your Study
-
Why do those activities happen as they do?
(incentives, facilitation, barriers and disincentives)
- Education is
not a machine - dealing with spontaneity and
diversity in the design of your study
- Confronting the
Dark Side
- Collaborating
with Stakeholders
-
Institutional Capacity to Support Studies That Make a
Difference
-
Ways in which TLT/Flashlight can help
Most self-studies and program reviews are
not about technology, so some people might see this kind of
study as a distraction. What arguments can be made for
making such a self-study a priority?
- Information technology (IT) changes
so rapidly and is used in so many ways in virtually
every field that its use (in the worlds of work,
research, and the academy) creates turbulent,
problematic possibilities for change. What a program
needs to do, what a program can potentially do, and the
range of (hidden) consequences of what a program has
done: all are changing rapidly. Self-study is an important way to figure out
if things are going well, or if the program is sliding
toward an unseen cliff!
Without data for guidance, there's a chance of enormous
waste of effort and money (click
here for an article about the nature of that waste, and
how to avoid it.)
- IT
also makes self-study more important because IT is
expensive and becomes obsolete relatively quickly: it's
important to get the details right in a hurry if the IT
investment isn't to go to waste; program evaluation can
help.
- A
third reason that IT makes good program evaluation more
important is because, ever since the advent of older
technologies such as large lecture halls and books,
technology has tended to increase the distance
(literally and functionally) between student and
expert. Increased distance has been used to enhance
quality in several different ways (e.g.,
Ehrmann, 1999;
Ehrmann
and Collins, 2001), but increased distance also
increases the chance that quality may be harmed (e.g.,
mutual misunderstanding; lack of interaction harming the
chances for higher order learning). So improved
assessment (studies of student learning) and program
evaluation (studies of program operation) are both
important.
Among the potential topics for such self-studies are
learning outcomes (e.g., information fluency, engineering
design skills, writing across the curriculum),
access/enrollment issues (e.g., technology-enabled
strategies for reducing attrition), program-specific issues
(e.g., quality enhancement of distance learning), and
studies that combine these and other issues (e.g., programs
of blended and hybrid courses - how can their impacts on
student learning, retention, and efficient use of space be
improved?)
Next Section:
Choosing Outcomes and Activities
|
