The final section of the draft report to be posted is the more free-form project evaluation. This is not the full evaluation which will appear in a paper later, and is intended to encapsulate the key findings of the project. As ever, comments and feedback are welcomed.
Project
evaluation (max. 500 words)
Please use
this space to provide information on the methods that you used for carrying out
an evaluation of the project, and the key findings and results from the
evaluation.
BACKGROUND
ILOOC was deconstructed into different
elements, and there were inserted at different stages and in different ways
into a final year law module. The module involved was LAW30231 Terrorism, which
has around 50 students enrolled:
·
One task was
mandatory, and formed part of seminar work. It was closed, and was only available
to the students on the modules, and not the wider public. It involved the
creation and posting of a video relating to the UN onto the YouTube platform.
·
One task was
voluntary, and involved the volunteer students accessing the MOOC content live,
along with the other MOOC participants.
·
The final task
was voluntary and closed.
The students
in the mandatory task were given the opportunity to create their own teams, and
those who did not engage with that part of the process were put into a default
group.
The volunteer students were a self-selecting
group from a module sub-set of students, comprising those who had engaged with unrelated
e-tivities earlier in the module, and had achieved “good” (A/B) grades in the
first assignment.
All students were given the opportunity to
feed back on the project, in answering the following questions anonymously:
1.
Did the task
meet your expectations?
2.
How did you
find the level of the task?
3.
Would this
type of delivery be a useful addition or replacement to traditional
face-to-face delivery?
4.
What other
comments would you like to make about the tasks?
STUDENT FEEDBACK
Mandatory /
Closed Task
The students engaged in predictable fashion –
those who had chosen a group completed it (to a greater or lesser extent), and
those who were placed in a group failed to engage at all. Feedback received was
limited to those who took part.
Voluntary
Tasks
The students generally liked the idea of this
type of activity and felt that in order for this to be successfully integrated
into “ordinary” delivery, clear signposting was required. They felt that this
was more the case with the closed sessions than the open sessions.
They also felt a level of comfort in the
closed sessions, as they knew the rest of the group who were participating. There
was a level of nervousness expressed at dealing with unknown participants, “strangers
from the outside” as one student put it.
Although they generally enjoyed the online
aspects of the tasks, the overwhelming feedback from the students was that this
sort of activity should be regarded as an enhancement of classroom activity,
and not a replacement. Unprompted, they said that this was not the same as “contact”
with the tutors and fellow students, even if some of that contact was
impersonal (i.e. in a lecture setting)
The students also felt, and this may turn out
to be linked to the previous point, that in a classroom setting, there was more
of a sense of belonging, and being part of a group. Not only did they find the online sessions
lonely (although several of the students completed the online tasks together,
so they were “alone in company”) but they also noted that it was easier to tell
who was participating in the activity. The analogy was made by one student that
“in a classroom setting, a room full of 25 people may contain 5 participants,
but the rest of the group feel, and are felt to be, “present”, whereas in an
online environment, even with the same proportion of participation, it feels as
though only 5 people are there.”
