In the literature, three generations of distance education have been identified (Garrison, 1985; Nipper, 1989). The first generation mostly involved individual learning and entailed the delivery of printed material to the students by mail. Communication between learner and tutor was based on a one-to-one model, and it entailed a very slow, sparse exchange of documents. The second generation was based on the use of multimedia teaching materials including videos, radio programs, open TV, cable TV, and educational software. These learning resources could be delivered via mail or through specialized telecommunication channels. In this case, tutor–student communication was based on a one-to-one or one-to-many model. The third generation, also called online education, takes full advantage of computer mediated communication systems and is heavily based on virtual communities and collaborative learning strategies. In this case, communication is based on a many-to-many model.
Published in Chapter:
The Relationship Between Assessment and Evaluation in CSCL
Serena Alvino (Institute for Educational Technology, National Research Council, Italy) and Donatella Persico (Institute for Educational Technology, National Research Council, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 6
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-845-1.ch092
Abstract
In the educational field, evaluation is a very complex activity due to the intrinsically multidimensional nature of the processes to be evaluated. Several variables must be taken into consideration, and they interact and influence one another: the object and the goal of the evaluation determines the criteria, the methods, and the data to be used for the evaluation. In this chapter, we will focus on evaluation in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). In this field, a primary role is played by the monitoring process, which allows us to gather important information about the learning process while it takes place. Indeed, monitoring serves three purposes: it provides real-time data about group dynamics so that they can be used by tutors to facilitate learning and stimulate collaboration among trainees; it provides designers and evaluators with data about learning system usage that are needed to evaluate its effectiveness; finally, it supplies information about the learning process and its outcomes, thereby informing assessment. Hence, monitoring can be seen as a sort of common denominator between the methods used to foster collaborative learning and those that allow the gathering of data for the two types of evaluation.