Evaluation

**Evaluation ** As defined by the American Evaluation Association, evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness. It means that evaluation is the systematic collection and analysis of data needed to make decisions, a process in which most well-run programs engage in from the outset (Wikipedia).

My Online Learning Activity (OLA) was designed using Google Docs ([]) and needed to be evaluated by the intended users whose feedback would make me as a developer improve and cater for their interests and concerns. A student and two teaching staff members (one internal & another acting as an external examiner) of English/Literature on distance education programs of Kyambogo University were given a chance to assess the Online learning activity designed using Google spread sheets (see []) and award marks to the student. The Examiners after assessing the student's work using Google Docs were asked to give formal feedback on the application. The developer used an email see figure below to collect the responses from a student and the two teaching staff member 
 * Print Screen of sample email sent to the teaching staff Members **

The teacher had the following reactions to the three questions posed to her in the email; She said that the beauty of the application included among others;easy accessibility of the student’s work on her laptop even when she is at home, availability of the necessary tool to make comments, instant delivery of comments to the student and a possibility of chatting with the student about the work, on line, made it not only easy but interesting.She further noted that the application was easy to use and worthwhile using in her teaching and learning context as long as her students had access to internet.

What she found particularly difficult was inserting a comment directly to where it should be (making specific comments to specific areas in the essay). She also thought it was not possible to indicate symbols pertaining to marking so she had to write detailed comments, and she couldn’t indicate marks of performance in case she was meant to but overall she was impressed with the fact that Google had all these applications other than the Google Web she had used before.

 Smiler questions were posed to the student who responded that; the application saved her money and time to deliver the assignment to the coordinating office and until now she keeps checking to update and make sure her work never gets lost like it usually happened when hard copies were misplaced by coordinating office and lecturers. One notable concern was the Bandwidth as she first tried the assignment using her 3G modem and the costs was beyond her expectations. The last challenge the student noted was failure to insert superscript as she had preferred that referencing style. Unfortunately she did not ask but even if she was to ask neither did I know how to insert superscripts in Google Docs.

Previous *** Home** **** Next