February 2001 — Features
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Evaluating Distance Education Across Twelve Time Zones
- Students are conscientious about attending the live lectures, but their use of the course Web site is more sporadic. They find the lecturers acceptable, but we recommend making training available to lecturers so that they can improve their abilities to deliver instruction using this medium.
- Certain features of the course Web site are not used much at all. Efforts should therefore be directed toward improving the more heavily used features, particularly the lecture notes, videos, and assignments.
- Students are more pleased with the system's video than its audio component.
- Students generally find the system acceptable, but even small glitches seem to have a significant impact on their perception of the efficiency of the learning process.
As we look ahead, we hope to use SMA students' suggestions to strengthen our delivery. Faculty members are discussing the possibility of pre-recording their lectures and putting them on the Web to view prior to synchronous class time. Live time together can then be better spent in discussion and problem solving between the students and faculty. The joint technical team from MIT, NUS, and NTU is working to create new tools to facilitate more effective learning during the synchronous class time.
For more information about SMA and technology-enabled learning developments from MIT, NUS and NTU, please visit the following Web sites:
Singapore-MIT Alliance: http://web.mit.edu/sma/
Center for Advanced Educational Services, MIT: www-caes.mit.edu/
Centre for Instructional Technology, NUS: www.cit.nus.edu.sg/
Centre for Educational Development, NTU: www.ntu.edu.sg/ced/ced.htm
Special Note of Thanks: We gratefully thank our colleagues at NUS for their participation in conducting this survey. Through their diligence, we received an outstandingly high percentage of completed surveys (87 percent). Without their efforts, this evaluation could not have happened. We also thank the SMA leadership for affording us the opportunity to survey their students.
Jesse M. Heines is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He specializes in the implementation and evaluation of interactive, user-centered programs with rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and their related technologies. Heines spent 10 years with Digital Equipment Corporation, where he founded the Computer-Based Course Development Group and developed a large variety of CBT courseware. He holds a B.S. in Earth Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.S. in Science Education from the University of Maine, and an Ed.D. in Educational Media and Technology from Boston University. He has done post-doctoral work at The Open University in Great Britain, Brown University in Rhode Island, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he currently holds an appointment as a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives.
