Evaluation Study … part 1

Over the last few days I have been testing the metadata generator with some willing participants (3 in total). There were four parts to this study. The first task set comprised of a series of find and complete tasks aimed at testing the intuitiveness of the interface and terminology. Participants at this stage weren’t privy to help files or detailed information about the applications processes. The following report presents the finding of this part of the study and makes recommendations regarding the interface and terminology used only. The next three parts, auto generation process, uploading to intraLibrary and the questionnaire result, will be forth coming over the next few days. In view of this study I have revisited some of the questionnaires we undertook early on, based on the paper prototyping. We had very few respondents, so statistical analysis was not warranted, however some of the comments made were taken on board at the time. I will be including a brief discussion of these and the relevant aspects and compare, if possible, to the more recent questionnaire results.

 

TEL Day: Questionnaire

The TEL day presented a good opportunity to promote the Streamline project alongside PERSoNA and the Institutional Repository. Nick and I put together a shared questionnaire between these three projects, which I have now done the preliminary analysis on. This report shows the questions I asked and some basic statistics gleaned from them. Nicks findings are available here on the projects respective blogs: PERSoNA and Repository.

We had twenty respondents in total many of whom also indicated that they were willing to participate in the focus groups Meg has mentioned. Unfortunately our first attempt at organising one has been cancelled due to lack of volunteers. Meg suggested that there is a lot going at the moment academically (exam boards and final marking) and that we would be better of in a coupe of weeks.

I’m going to take these results and re-examine them alongside our previous questionnaires. I’m manly look for patterns of positive or negative attitudes and work practices towards the process around learning object creation and re-use. I will post these up in couple of weeks with a more detailed report. I’m also going to have a look at the social networking questions Nick asked in regard to our ideas about the organisation and sharing of learning objects.

Reflections from York

We have a large contingent from Streamline at the Project Startup meeting for Emerge in York. At the programme meeting this morning the e-Framework was raised as an issue for all the e-administration projects – and probably for many U&I projects. John Heap, one of our team members, produced a e-framework briefing document for the rest of us on Streamline, which we have been asked to share here. It was written for internal consumption so pulls no punches – but I haven’t edited it as perhaps it is important to express some of the genuine frustrations of trying to make sense of how to contribute.

Our conclusion is that much of what we are doing as a matter of course can contribute to the e-Framework but it would still be useful to have a clearer steer as to how to do this most effectively.

Moodle review

Moodle is a widely used open source eLearning course management system, available for download from: http://www.moodle.org. It offers a wide range of features which is enhanced by a whole host of plugins produced by the open source community. The following document: Moodle review, reviews Moodle as a candidate for using as a test bed repository for learning objects.