Thread:Gordon - Checking in (1)

Hi everyone,

Good to see some familiar faces, and some new ones.

Firstly an apology. I have been away all of last week in Australia and will be away all of next week as well so will be a bit late starting up.

By way of an introduction, for those who don't know me, I am an Education Officer in the NZ Navy. This is my fifth paper and the reason for my participation is that the Defence Force is about to acquire a Learning Management System and, as well as being on the LMS project team, my role as the Training Development Coordinator means that I also have the responsibility for acquiring the e-learning content for the LMS. I have a team of developers who currently produce material for F2F courses and I also have a team of CBT developers, who produce some really clever stuff. I need to have a good overview of all aspects of e-learning in order to provide the leadership for the transition to blended courses.

My interest in evaluation is primarily to ensure that the e-learning content that we do use is effective and meets the needs of the fleet. It may be that we spend money to acquire some COTS, or we employ external developers to produce some material for us, in which case I need to ensure that the public's money is being well spent. If my own team are developing then I need to ensure that it is an efficient use of manpower resources.

What I know already is that our evaluation currently consists of smile sheets, assessments and some workplace feedback, i.e. Kirkpatricks levels 1,2 and 3. However no critical analysis of exactly what is, or should be, evaluated takes place and the possible evaluation methods that could be used. I hope to gain a better appreciation of the whole concept of evaluation, and a range of tools to assist.

I hope to use one of the CBT packages developed in-house as a project. In this way it should be possible to modify and improve the course as a direct result of doing this paper.

I have started a blog but there isn't anything on it yet, so don't bother visiting just now.

Looking forward to working with you all.

Cheers

Gordon