Assessing Purposeful Online Teaching and Design Quality: A Symposium on Efficacy Assessment
Abstract: This essay introduces a series of papers that support an AACE E-Learn 2007 Symposium. Diverse strategies are presented through which online course designers and teachers may secure an accurate sense of whether their methods are achieving desired goals, substantive and procedural. Relating to the overall theme of the symposium, individual components focus on the following topics: clarity of purpose in online course design and teaching methodology, specific techniques for formative and summative assessment, third-party collaboration for objective data analysis and ethics in online course quality assessment and published research stemming therefrom. This first paper offers an introductory discussion of the issues addressed in greater detail by the three remaining works in this symposium series.