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Monitoring
of Status . . .
for
Instructors
One
of the biggest challenges facing instructors of online courses
is monitoring the progress of the learners in their course.
Course
management software could include tools to allow the instructor
to monitor the following areas:
- learner
"attendance"; how often have they visited the site?
which modules have they completed?
- learner
progress on deliverables (Which assignments have been turned
in? Which are outstanding?)
for
Learners
It
is easy to feel out of touch in an online course. It is useful
for learners to have a page where they can see their progress
and the assignments and deliverables which are coming due.
The
following are some means that could be used to keep learners
apprised of their progress:
- the
site should contain an outlined schedule of major class milestones
such as project due dates
- as
these milestones are reached, and deliverables submitted,
this progress should be reflected in some way
The
approach to monitoring current status . . .
for
Instructors
There is a gradebook that can be set up to monitor student progress.
I was not able to see a feature that would allow the instructor
to view all the individual students data on a specific assignment.
The gradebook appears to be functional but definitely not one
of the strong points of this package. Figure
1 shows a screenshot of a sample gradebook page.
for
Learners
The gradebook feature allows the students to view their progress
in the course. This feature of course depends on the instructor
keeping the evaluations up to date. The layout is functional,
but one feature that is not present is the ability of the instructor
to add comments to individual assignments. This of course could
be done through some of the communication tools, but it is much
better to have related items visible at once. A screenshot of
a sample gradebook page is visible in Figure
1.
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