The experience of working collaboratively in creating a rubric for the Athabasca University was very interesting. For our case study, the focus was to expand Athabasca’s programs to South Asia but one of their main concerns was the internet connectivity in the remote areas. We started off with everyone brainstorming ideas on a Google Doc and interestingly enough, we all noted down very similar criteria. This formulated our five main categories for our rubric: functionality, accessibility, support, technical requirements and cost. We elaborated on each category by using the SECTIONS framework (Bates, 2014) as the foundation and ensuring all the components were addressed in the rubric criteria.
Throughout the process, I realize that it was very difficult to include detailed evaluation criteria for every stakeholder involved. Although our goal was to ensure that administrators, instructors, and students are all accounted for in the evaluation, it was not possible to address the independent needs of each stakeholder equally in the rubric. It is obvious that certain criteria are of major concern to one stakeholder and not so much to another. For example, Costs might be a criterion that is of importance to administrators but Assessment/Evaluation might be the most important criterion for instructors. We considered including subcategories for each stakeholder but soon realize that it will be too complicated to have all of this incorporated into one rubric. Instead, we tried our best to keep the criteria more generic so that it can be applied across everyone. I believe that the review and selection of a LMS should involve the diverse group of stakeholders involved as they are the ones that will be affected by the system (Coates et al., 2005). Oftentimes, it seems that discussions around the LMS does not take into consideration of how it can affect students (Coates et al., 2005), for example. I question how the institution will be able to take all the stakeholders feedback into consideration equally, given this variation.
This assignment allowed me to take a closer look into the support services of an LMS. When an institution adopts a new LMS, it needs to review the teaching and technology support services currently available and evaluate whether reorganization and restructuring is necessary; we should not simply follow the existing structure of how things work (Bates, 2014). The first criterion that came to mind was the day to day technical support (e.g. problems logging in, how to access the grades, etc.) along with the support hours available since Athabasca University only delivers online courses. We expanded on the criteria of support and included Training as well as Best Practices. Without training available to orient users on how to use the LMS, they will not know what it is capable of and may even end up not using it at all (Bates, 2014). By providing users with a short period of training, it will “enable [users] to see the potential value of all features and not just those that stumble across” (Bates, 2014). In addition to offering training on its features and how to use the LMS, we also need to consider best practice models and providing opportunities for everyone to share their experiences (Coates et al., 2005).
I had a great experience working with such professional group members for this assignment and I learned a lot from other’s experiences. Also, I appreciated that we were all on the same time zone, making meetings a lot easier to schedule!
References:
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of Learning Management Systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary Education and Management, 11(1), 19-36.