Evaluating Blended Learning

HKUST's Evaluation Framework

As part of the efforts to create and establish good models for Blended Learning (BL) courses at HKUST, all of the current BL courses take part in an evaluation process. Data is collected from all stakeholders and analyzed to highlight good practices, challenges and areas for improvements.

A series of evaluation activities will be conducted to collect data about the experience, attitudes, and opinions of the teaching staff and students on a BL course. Details of the evaluation activities are summarized in the table below.

Activities

Objectives

Flipped classroom observations To observe how the classroom activities encourage the students to widen their perspectives through peer discussions and deepen their understanding of the subject through applications; to evaluate the interactions in-class and identify good practices or challenges that stem from the BL approach.
Student Blended Learning Survey To capture students’ learning behaviors and experience in this blended course down to the course component level.
Student Feedback Questionnaire (SFQ) To capture students’ perception and overall learning experience with regard to the aims of blended learning in this blended course.
Student focus group To collect students’ in-depth opinions about their BL experience, how learning differs from that in other traditional courses they had, and the impact of BL approach on their learning, etc.
Course instructor interview To learn more about the course instructor’s experience in regards to the design, delivery, and effectiveness of the BL course, as well as the support they need.
Teaching assistant focus group To learn more about the experience of the teaching assistants in regards to the design, delivery, and effectiveness of the BL course, as well as the support they need.
Canvas course analytics To identify the trend of students’ usage pattern. The data collected offers a rough idea of an overall picture of the online activities in Canvas.

An evaluation report consolidating responses, comments and suggestions from different stakeholders will be released to the course team after course completion.

 

Additional Resources on Evaluation Frameworks

Frameworks for evaluation

Resources

Sloan-C Quality Framework (The 5 Pillars)

The framework focuses on five areas of evaluation:

  1. Learning effectiveness
  2. Scale (cost effectiveness and commitment)
  3. Access
  4. Faculty satisfaction
  5. Student satisfaction

It describes the goals of each of these elements and discusses some possible metrics.

The 5 Pillars
http://sloanconsortium.org/5pillars

Col Survey
(Arbaugh, Cleveland-Innes et al., 2008)

The Community of Inquiry Survey Instrument identifies three areas of evaluation:

  1. Teaching presence
  2. Social presence
  3. Cognitive presence

The survey consist of a 34 statements. To view the survey go to the website above and click on Download the Col survey.

Col Survey
https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/coi-survey/

Blended Learning Toolkit

The Blended Learning Toolkit was prepared by the University of Central Florida and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. It provides two separate surveys exploring the experience of the students and the faculty members involved in the blended course.

Blended Learning Toolkit
https://blended.online.ucf.edu/evaluation-resources/survey-instruments/

It is also worth exploring some of the other resources that the Blended Learning Toolkit has posted on their page, including the Process of creating a course, examples of blended courses, and effective practices:
https://blended.online.ucf.edu/