Term Break

Evaluation plan submitted, now have some areas to work on. Good to receive feedback. 

Still feeling frustrated with knowing where to set up changes in regard to the evaluation plan, so that others in the group can work effectively together :S

Spoke to Sue to clarify a few ideas - spending too much time on re doing format, and where able to access updated information.................

The evaluation project is proving to be more of a challenge than I thought :( Technology problems!
I understand the importance of backing up work that has been created but I thought the information created initially whilst working on our wiki could be copied for back-up.... silly me. So my lesson is to create first... (somewhere reliable?), save and then paste into the wiki :S (it's still quicker than writing in free-hand...)
Much frustration has been experienced these last 2 weeks... something that must be considered with instruction/guidance for the students in readiness for online learning.
Making time to blog regularly aside from the technology angst, students are also very demanding this time of year, or is it just that it's a busy semester? 
I've been trying to organise my thoughts in regard to triangulation and the methodology for our evaluation. Making clear decisions on exactly what to evaluate is quite challenging - with regard to the eLearning guidelines, there are many areas one would like to follow-up, however,  with the limited amount of time we have decided to focus from a Learner centred approach, identifying if the use of eLearning is the best way to achieve the intended outcomes and whether or not the learning objectives are clearly defined to assist them with their learning activities. Bates and Obexer (2005) identify moving away from the teacher being the 'centre of instruction' towards the learner taking on a more active role in the process of their own learning. They add that  Beaudoin (1999),  sees the teachers role as 'mentor, facilitator, and guide through the transformative process of learning'. 
The course we are evaluating is designed with such principles, and so choosing the Pragmatic-Mixed Methods Paradigm approach we aim to triangulate our findings using 3 different methods to collect data -  a questionnaire, focus group and expert review - to gain feedback to the actual effectiveness of the course.