Session 3: Course Evaluation

I chose to evaluate a course that is very similar to the course that I will deliver. It is a music production course offered through Berklee Music, which features the same software that I will be utilizing. I selected the ECP rubric to assess the course because I feel that out of those reviewed; the ECP’s criteria are the most comprehensive. I evaluated all of the elements listed within the rubric and will discuss those that impacted the course the most as well as how this evaluation has influenced my approach to course design.

The first element that I examined was course design. The content of this course is extremely well organized and navigating through the class couldn’t be easier.  A side navigation bar is constantly accessible which allows you to access nearly any portion of the course directly no matter where you are in the site. There are also tabs along the top that give the student access to important information such as announcements, the class discussion forum and the course homepage. All references to anything located elsewhere in the course are displayed as active links to that respective source. Though the course objectives are not prevalent on the home page, there are sets of specific goals for each unit, which give the student a good idea of what to expect in the lesson to follow. The goals seem to be a bit general, but I think that if they were more specific that they could overwhelm some students. I would give this course an “accomplished” rating in goals and objectives and “exemplary” in content presentation.

Next I reviewed the interaction and collaboration components of the course. The interaction expectancies are clearly defined and the discussions posted were meaningful, but not very extensive. I was unable to see any form of synchronous communication in place, but the activities that required asynchronous communication were definitely designed to build a sense of community among the learners. Each exercise had a discussion forum posted at its conclusion and they are displayed in a way where all posts are openly viewable. I like this layout because you can see how the discussion transpired unlike in other forums where you have to select each post individually to expand it. This may preserve some student anonymity, but detracts from a sense of community involvement. The instructor initiated all posts, however no feedback was ever provided to the students within the forum. As for the guidelines, there were general rules in place for forum discussion, but most of it was common knowledge. There was no mention of how theses discussion posts would weigh into the class participation grading. For this reason I would give the rating of “promising” for interaction logistics in his course.

The next element evaluated was assessment. Though the assessments in this course seem to follow the goals and objectives, there is no clear rubric provided. There was not mention anywhere of the significance of the quizzes as far as grading. The only forms of assessment within the course were quizzes and assignments. Self-assessment activities were nonexistent besides the small amount of individual feedback provided in the class discussions. As a result I would issue a rating of “promising” for the self-assessment component.

The only remaining criterion that wasn’t met under the learner support element was supportive software. The main issue was that there were no links to sites where you could obtain the software required for the course. There was also no additional information on choosing or obtaining the necessary hardware. I am under the assumption that this was done purposely due to the college policy. Since the school is a specialty school for music only, they probably don’t want their faculty soliciting or promoting vendors because of their ties to the music industry. Nonetheless, I would give this area a rating of incomplete.

All in all, the entire course site was well designed and packed full of valuable learning resources. I really like the user-friendly layout and will attempt to modify my course to follow this template. There were many aspects of the course that I admired and I wish I had evaluated it prior to my course design. There were also a few areas that needed some attention and raised awareness of possible insufficiencies within my site. The most salient of these would be accommodations for disabilities. Without actually testing the site with voice recognition software, there is no real way to know if it is truly compliant. I am hesitant to say that is, especially due to the amount of embedded audio samples within exercises and uncaptioned tutorial videos. It would be far too much work for me to add captioning to my videos at this point, so I will do my best to provide text equivalents to all unreadable media files. This evaluating exercise was great practical experience, but it made me realize how much work I have left!