MDDE617+Unit+5+Overview

=Unit 5 Program Evaluation and Distance Education=

Assignment #3 due on completion of Unit 5

Sadly, formal program evaluation is not attended to often enough in distance education, or in conventional education, for that matter. And when it has been undertaken in distance education, there has been an inclination to use a comparative measuring stick - i.e. to judge distance education courses and programs in relation to conventional or traditional courses and programs. So frequently the overarching question has been, "Does this program work as well or result in as much success as the face-to-face program?" There are two major problems with this comparative approach.
 * 1) The face-to-face program being used as a comparison is not likely to have ever been formally evaluated.
 * 2) Distance education programs cater to different learners with different needs, and their design takes that into account, so comparing the two types of programs may be akin to comparing apples and oranges. They are different entities serving different purposes, or at least that has been the case until the advent of online and web-based learning.

In evaluating distance education programs, evaluators can apply many of the same models, forms, approaches to data collection and analysis that they use in traditional education and training settings. Moore (1999) suggests that a good, ongoing monitoring system plays a critical part in the success of any quality distance education program (p. 5).

Unit 5 Objectives
After completing this unit, you should be able to do the following:
 * 1) Discuss the unique challenges of evaluation at a distance.
 * 2) Describe specific applications of program evaluation to distance education.
 * 3) Develop a proposal for an evaluation of a distance education program