E-CURRICULUM AND UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO WORK TO IMPROVE EVALUATION OF ONLINE EDUCATION
(PRWEB) March 7, 2000
Educators Conduct Evaluation Research on Instruments Designed to Measure
Success of Internet Education
DENVER, Color., March 3, 2000 – E-Curriculum Corp, a Berkeley-based education consulting company, and the University of Colorado will work in tandem for the next year to perform reliability, instrument reduction, and internal consistency tests on assessment content deployed through E-Curriculum’s evaluation engine, CoursemetricÔ.
To insure that education outcomes measured with Coursemetric™ are statistically valid, E-Curriculum will work with researchers at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center to test questions designed specifically to assess learner satisfaction and technology performance in online education.
Current forecasts indicate that nearly 85% of all colleges and universities will be offering education online within the next two years, and this will have significant effects on teaching and learning. “A distinctly different kind of teaching is necessary for this new environment. And this new manner of teaching requires new modes of evaluation, and new forms of collaboration” notes Dr. Mary McHugh, who will direct the project and is an expert in the field of Informatics. “Blending private-sector technology with education-area expertise will allow education to achieve more goals in their Internet education projects in a much shorter amount of time. I think this research can be a model for future public-private partnerships for educational research and corporate innovations.”
Dr. McHugh has previously examined issues critical to the learning process when the material is taught through the Internet and will work directly with educators from E-Curriculum to validate measurement instruments for online education. These instruments will be tested for face validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability.
E-Curriculum CEO David Harden says, “Working with the University of Colorado to validate these instruments is an important step in achieving our shared goal of providing educators with a simple, cost-effective way of understanding the effect new technologies have on the ways we teach and the ways we learn.”
The results will be delivered via the Web through E-Curriculum’s unique leaning evaluation engine: Coursemetric™. Automating the communication process related to teaching and learning evaluation, Coursemetric™ is designed to anonymously survey students and instructors regarding their teaching and learning experiences in any education environment. Requiring only a Web-browser to operate, this tool provides instructors and trainers with instantaneous feedback and allows education organizations and training entities the first means ever to immediately aggregate learning outcomes: across courses, departments, instructors and institutions, and over time.
About E-Curriculum
E-Curriculum, Inc., based in Berkeley, CA, provides Web-based tools and information management solutions designed to optimize the quality of the learning.
For more information visit http://www. e-curriculum. com (http://www. e-curriculum. com).
Contact: Kristin Gray, 510.548.9507, kristing@e-curriculum. com.
About UCHS
The University of Colorado Health Sciences Center is the only academic health center in the state and region. With a four-part mission of education, research, patient care and community service, the campus serves as the hub of a broad network for health care delivery.
For more information visit http://www. uchsc. edu (http://www. uchsc. edu).
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