google+edX: More online courses to evaluate!

This week, as most of us educators enrolled in the edtech 522 class  are trying to learn new techniques and strategies to be a successful online teacher, it comes as a pleasant coincidence that google has partnered with edX  and this is being hailed as a major step forward for MOOCs and online learning. We were aware that online education is growing exponentially but this partnership has just endorsed it! I read this article in ecampus news that the internet software company and MOOC nonprofit are teaming up to develop a new website powered by edX’s open source learning platform, Open edX.

We are soon going to see more and more open sourced units of instruction posted online by instructors and current faculty from various colleges. Soon a day will come when we have to segregate the wheat from the chaff!  This made me realize the importance of what we are trying to do this week, develop a rubric to evaluate the quality of online instruction. Thus motivated I started reading some peer reviewed journals and doing some scholarly research to develop my rubric.

I particularly like the rubric developed by (Ternus, Palmer & Faulk, 2007). This provides for both qualitative and quantitative evaluation tools. These can be used by any instructor developing an online course for self evaluation or peer evaluation. The rubric is four dimensional and covers the following:

Structure (Context, Organization, and Environment)

Content (Presentation of Information)

Processes (Relationships and Interactions)

Outcomes (Mastery of Content and Course Evaluation)

I will be developing my rubric for evaluation of the two online courses taking relevant material from this tried and tested framework which covers all aspects of an online course.

I would love to hear what other resources are being used to develop rubrics. Please give your feedback and link to other resources. Thanks

References:

Ternus, M. P., Palmer, K. L., & Faulk, D. R. (2007). … The Journal of Effective Teaching, 7(2), 51-67

http://www.ecampusnews.com/online-learning/mooc-google-edx-139/