May Break - back in 2 weeks

Higher Ed Assessment Blog is on semester break. Next post will be up on 2 June 2009.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Free online survey tool, SurveyBob

SurveyBob.com stands out among the free survey tools for unlimited usage. No maximums are imposed on number of surveys, number of survey items, number of respondents.

Creating a survey takes minutes. The software generates URLs and HTML code for use in email and web pages. The site also provides a space for Bob-generated email to potential respondents.

An option: to share or not share results automatically with respondents.

The cost: a banner ad appears on the survey.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Expand Your Bookshelf: 37 Free Books

The American Evaluation Association web site provides links to online handbooks and texts "in their entirety online." Evaluation subjects are addressed in generalist guides as well as specialty areas such as community health. The great majority are written in "how-to" mode.

Annotations on the dedicated web page include scope and intended audience. Format is also noted, which helps to locate PDFs that can be easily downloaded or shared with others by specifying page numbers of pertinent sections.

Among the 41 entries only 4 cannot be reached via the provided links (current to May 2009):

Evaluation Toolkit (Project Star)
Evaluation Toolkit: Quasi-Experimental Design (HRDC)
Return Results (Pew Trusts)
User-friendly Handbook for Mixed-method Evals (NSF)

Educators will recognize Bill Trochim's Research Methods Knowledge Base, continuing to offer a good set of free web pages. (Trochim's extended-material book can be purchased in print or on web.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Be Brief: Example from Miami U

Assessment Brief is the name that Miami University gives to one-page information sheets. The masthead carries the title Assessment in Action but also notes "Assessment Brief" with a number. Assessment Brief #39 from September 26, 2008, highlights several assessment efforts and also advertises monthly Assessment Luncheons.

Miami U's Assessment web site is an extensive resource that documents assessment projects (check out the Top 25 Project on the left-hand menu) as well as guides to rubrics and surveys (check out Assessment Tools on the right-hand menu).

The Staff link presents the people behind the work: cross-disciplinary staff, Assessment Fellows, and the Assessment Team. A nice model.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Realists Adopting Academic Continuity Plans

With heightened awareness about the potential effects of a flu pandemic, campus administrators and faculty groups are considering response strategies suitable to their programs. Continuity of learning can mean different things to different stakeholders and a single campus may have a variety of responses. This list reflects some of the common preparations by both onground and online academic programs:

— Require that onground instructors include at least one online learning activity per course in order to familiarize students with the campus learning management system (LMS such as Blackboard) in case a campus closure requires that courses meet online.

— Require that online instructors includes at least one activity in a Web 2.0 tool (such as a wiki or blog) through which a course could "meet" in case the regular delivery method is disrupted.

— Collect student contact information at the start of every course through an online survey tool, storing the data outside of the regular LMS.

— Assist faculty or program staff in establishing an alternative means of contact such as a web page to check for announcements, a telephone tree, or other contact with an agreed-upon timeline (e.g., for use after a disruption of 24 hours).

— Outline an expected procedure so that faculty and students may assume that adjustments will be made and so that they do not feel compelled to email queries (e.g., "The Dean or Chair will begin notifications after 48 hours; students will not have to phone or email professors. Announcements will be posted or emailed and you should assume that adjustments will be made in your courses.)

— Request that students keep their contact information up to date in campus computer systems.

— Ask instructors to consider alternate assignments that address student learning outcomes in case the planned assignments or exams cannot be delivered.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Social Distancing: Campus Response to a Flu Pandemic

Response to campus disruptions can be planned. But until it is tested, an institution has no idea if the plan is adequate. An exercise in 2007 by University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill illustrates the power of even a limited-scope test.

The School of Public Health simulated a campus closure for four graduate classes, limiting the experiment to just a couple of days. As on-ground classes, the sections had not used online technology up to that point and, in fact, most of the students enrolled had no experience at all in online education. The School's report on the experiment offers lessons learned.

One rationale for the UNC test was preparation for a flu pandemic. A leading strategy for response, as seen in the 2009 response in K-12 school districts, is social distancing or literally putting space between humans to reduce spread of a disease. A key strategy of online education (with a nod to the similar vocabulary) is social presence.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Campus disruptions, pandemics, and good timing

Business continuity (BC) plans consider any day a bad day for a disruption in campus activity and services. You may find some calendar considerations for when to test contingency measures but otherwise BC assumes that some response is needed every day of the year.

Academic continuity (AC) plans, where they exist, are more likely to specify responses according to time of semester or quarter. Our limited examples demonstrated that timing mattered. When Hurricane Katrina hit, the fall semester was only just underway. With a full semester ahead, it was possible to recover, helped tremendously by the Sloan Semester. The remarkable aspect of that solution was that Sloan-C coordinated the project in only 21 days. Would the solution have been possible in a disruption at mid-term?

At Virginia Tech, administrators made a good call in offering students the option of leaving campus without penalty—possible because most students were within 2-3 weeks of the end of their courses. Similarly, in the current response to flu, campus administrators have some leeway with end-of-term timing and, with luck, enough breathing space to make good decisions about holding or canceling commencement gatherings.

If there is any benefit to the pandemic (or near-pandemic, depending on your lens), it is in the heads-up for campuses not yet attending to academic continuity planning. For an extensive model that addressed the possibility of H5N1 pandemic influenza (and remains in place) see Middlebury College's Pandemic Flu Response web site and supporting documentation.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.