JISC

Summary

This project is called Evaluating feedback for e-learning:centralised tutors or EFFECT.  It’s all about evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and the impact of an innovative tutoring system on learner motivation and learner success.  The tutoring system was introduced last year to further enhance an online professional development programme for lecturers in the tertiary (or post compulsory) education sector.  The professional development programme is called Teaching Qualification (Further Education) and is delivered online via the Blackboard virtual learning environment at University of Dundee.  With 200 participants undertaking the programme annually, we faced the challenge of how to continue to provide effective support and feedback to so many participants, with a programme teaching team which had been radically cut (over a period of four years, the team shrunk from the equivalent of eight full time members of staff to less than five).

Last year the team launched ‘TQFE-Tutor’, a centralised email account, blog and microblog, all badged ‘TQFE-Tutor’.  All communication with our programme participants is now conducted through TQFE-Tutor and as its name suggests, TQFE-Tutor is concerned with the full tutoring role and processes.  It brings the tutoring team together to ‘work as one’ online across the blog, email and microblog on a rota basis and is providing a range of benefits to learners and staff alike.  For instance, learners on the programme now have much greater opportunities for peer interaction, collaboration and formative peer assessment; they are guaranteed a fast response to any query they submit via TQFE-Tutor and assured of high quality guidance and feedback – the teaching team all learn from each other and initial signs are that the quality of our assessment and feedback practice has been thereby improved.

The EFFECT project will evaluate e-submission (another innovation in the TQ(FE) programme in the past year) and TQFE-Tutor, with a view to further refining these innovations, focussing upon both the workload and pedagogical benefits they afford. 

Objectives

The EFFECT project has one major objective: to robustly evaluate the TQFE-Tutor innovations (centralised tutoring and e-submission), with a view to refining the system and producing guidance for others delivering programmes in similar contexts.  The project will involve the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data; methods are outlined in 1.4 below.

• Design and build blog to gather data and disseminate findings
• Evaluate stakeholder views of TQFE-Tutor
• Quantify efficiencies provided by TQFE-Tutor
• Disseminate the results of the evaluation
• Modify TQFE-Tutor in the light of the evaluation

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• Project plan
• A project blog (Wordpress, on a University of Dundee server)
• First briefing paper
• Evaluation report
• Second briefing paper
• Project participation in JISC programme level activities
• Conference presentation

Project Blog

http://blog.dundee.ac.uk/effect/