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PEER
REVIEWS:
Canadian educational institutions are actively
involved in the creation of innovative products and
processes designed to improve the quality of learning.
Examples of these products may include the development
of learning objects, a virtual course, or a technology-mediated
learning environment in support of face-to-face delivery.
Quite often, an educator who seeks to enhance learning
through the creation of these objects does so with considerable
costs in both time and money. The result is the loss
of opportunity for other teaching, research and service
priorities.
Because scholarship at the post-secondary level has
traditionally been restricted to the print media, there
is little or no formal evaluation accorded to an educational
object, to its innovators, or to the process of creation.
Typically, evaluation committees have difficulty in
assessing the value of educational innovation due to
their lack of expert knowledge and an absence of any
systematic process to evaluate the quality of the product.
Strides have been made in this process and projects
such as the BELLE (Broadband Enabled Life Long Learning)
Project and the MERLOT group have looked at methodologies
to assess the scholarly contributions of individual
faculty members.
OTHER RESOURCES:
A
Convergent Participation Model for Evaluation of Learning
Objects
By
John Nesbit, Karen Belfer and John Vargo. Canadian Journal
of Learning and Technology, Volume 28 (3), 2002. The
properties that distinguish learning objects from other
forms of educational software - global accessibility,
metadata standards, finer granularity and reusability
- have implications for evaluation. This article proposes
a convergent participation model for learning object
evaluation in which representatives from stakeholder
groups converge towardmore similar descriptions and
ratings through a two-stage process supported by online
collaboration tools.
Information
Gateways Handbook chapter 2.1
Quality selection: ensuring the quality of your collection.
DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information
on Research and Education)The DESIRE group has compiled
an extensive and comprehensive handbook designed to
support libraries and other organizations interested
in setting up large-scale information gateways on the
Internet. This chapter addresses the quality and evaluation
of Internet resources.
MERLOT:
Peer Review of Instructional Technology
by Gerard L. Hanley and Cher Thomas. Syllabus Magazine
Volume 14, No. 3 October 2000. An examination of the
MERLOT Project's efforts to find innovative ways of
providing peer-reviewed multimedia to educators through
a cooperative, Web-based forum.
The
good, the bad and the useless: evaluating Internet resources
by Judith Edwards Ariadne Volume 16, July 1998.
MERLOT
(Multimedia
Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)
MERLOT's peer review process.
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