• Recognize evaluation is part of all Instructional Design Systems models;
• Recognize evaluation is ongoing;
• Recognize what is typically evaluated in online learning for academic courses:
• instructional materials/strategies/;
• instructors, learner reactions, learner achievement;
• Define Formative and Summative Evaluation;
• Identify examples of formative evaluation and its role in online learning ;
• Identify examples of summative evaluation;
• Recognize the role of USF official course evaluations;
• Using the prompts as a guide, identify an evaluation plan (include formative and summative examples) for your future online course.
• Finally, reflect on the importance of evaluation as a whole to your teaching process.

Whether you realize it or not you are constantly making judgments about your courses. So you have already begun the evaluation process (a formative evaluation). In addition you may have found yourself evaluating a course once you have taught it. This is known as a summative evaluation.

Formative Evaluation

Typically with a formative evaluation you are still designing or developing materials. To conduct a formative evaluation you will work with the constituents of the project (learners, developers, etc) and gather feedback and reactions about the project. During a formative evaluation it's important that you identify what is working, but more importantly what's not working.

By using this term “summative” it is implied that the evaluation is accomplished at the conclusion of an instructional product, once it has been used. So summative evaluations are concerned with how well an instructional product (a lesson, a program, CDROM, web site, etc) did its job (past tense). There are many types of summative evaluations, for instance one many want to conduct a summative evaluation of a workshop series. Usually evaluators use some sort of evaluation model or tool to evaluate instructional products.

Please take a moment to review this interactive presentation. It will help you to identify examples of summative and formative evaluation.

All university courses for instance are evaluated. As a student you probably have filled out a paper-based course evaluation with standardized questions from the state. These course evaluations are later used by departments and colleges to gauge an instructor’s performance.

Now that we have established the importance of evaluation in your online courses, where do you begin? Here are some prompts/questions to get you started.

1. What is the importance of evaluation within your course?
2. For your future online course, explain how you plan on including formative evaluation? Give specific examples.
3. For your future online course, explain how you plan on including summative evaluation? Be certain to include the USF official course evaluations in your plan.
4. Provide a paragraph on how useful or not useful this exercise has been to you.

Using the above listed prompts/questions as a guide, identify an evaluation plan (include formative and summative examples) for your future online lesson.
Finally take a few minutes to reflect on the importance of evaluation during the teaching process keeping in mind the evaluation plan that you wrote up and post these items in your Blackboard Journal.