Evaluation of Educational Technologies
Assignment 12
CTER 2 - Fall 1999
Amy Fahey
As one who promotes the use of educational technologies at the university (i.e. College level), I have really struggled with the question of how to evaluate educational technologies. My struggles are reflected at the institutional level, where administrators struggle with how the dollars they have spent to support educational technology are being used. They are justifiably trying to evaluate the results. According to a recent statistic, higher education spends in excess of $6 billion a year in support of instructional technologies. What drives the push for developing web-based and web-enhanced courses in the modern university? It may come out of the traditional research/teaching mission traditionally throught of, and it comes out of the need to compete and survive as well. Other institutions are doing this, offering courses, and we must do this as well. Differing factions see the impact and usefulness of instructional technologies in different ways, and in many ways it may be too early in the process for us to begin to appropriately evaluate these technologies, mostly because we don’t have enough perspective.
Not only are there issues of cost, the use of limited resources, ease of use and pedagogical issues, but ethical criteria intertwine as well. Accessibility issues are increasingly important from a moral as well as a legal standpoint, and the economic questions and barriers leave some students in an increasingly separate landscape lacking the basic technology, despite the ballooning expenditures.
The project website that I am working on with my colleagues from higher education tries to present a variety of resources for faculty, and recommends a number of these questions to faculty as a starting point before creating a web-enhanced or web-based course. In research for this assignment, I looked at the Sapio Institute website (http://www.sapio.org). Sapio Institute is a non-profit, independent research and professional development institution. The Sapio Institute studies and evaluates effects and effectiveness of interactive learning, and includes a lot of interesting research papers and position documents regarding the evaluation of educational technologies. This is the website URL I entered into the open directory and this is a website I will bookmark for future research purposes because of its excellent content.