E-learning Goals

The desired outcome is that some employees would add pollinator-friendly plants to their own garden spaces to contribute to the health of the overall pollinator population.

Kirkpatrick Levels

Level 1 Reaction

Poll questions to discover if learners found the information within the course to be helpful, interesting, and informational.

Level 2 Learning

Assessment questions on declarative an procedural knowledge covered in the course.

Level 3 Behavior

Essay questions to gauge how learners might be thinking differently about gardening habits after taking the course.

Level 4 Results

I will encourage learners to come back to the LMS and post a public (visible to other employees) comment, stating how they have put into practice what they have learned, possibly even uploading pictures of plants they’ve added to their garden spaces as a result of the training. But I recognize that is kind of a longshot, and people may not respond in this way, even if they are putting their knowledge into practice.

Assessment Techniques and Tools

Techniques

The assessments in my course will not contain formal grading, because the course itself is optional training for employees, and not related to their job tasks. I will provide learners with immediate, descriptive feedback regarding the choices they make in the assessment questions.

After some thought, I have decided to break up the summative assessment into formative assessments (one or two questions each) after each topic. These will be informal, and not framed as “assessments” or “tests” to the learner.

I do plan to have a summative assessment. Again, because the course is optional training, I want to be careful how I am assessing my learners. I don’t want learners to feel trapped or like their time is not being respected, but I do want to know they understand the content by completion of the course. The summative assessment will be primarily made up of typed-response questions.

I do not know if will be able to address validity. The only way I can imagine doing that is if all of my learners had taken other tests related to pollinators and the plants they like. As for reliability, the test will be administered as part of the overall course, not have a human administrator of the test, or a human grading the test. However, I want to encourage learners to come back to the LMS and post a public (visible to other employees) comment, stating how they have put into practice what they have learned, possibly even uploading pictures of plants they’ve added to their garden spaces as a result of the training. But I recognize that is kind of a longshot, and people may not respond in this way, even if they are putting their knowledge into practice.

I plan to test a mix of declarative and procedural knowledge, though there will probably be more questions related to declarative knowledge than procedural. The content presented in the course is mostly procedural, though some is a bit more hands on, which is where I will have some procedural questions.

Most of the assessment questions/activities will center around quantitative data. This is due to the nature of the course content, which is mostly declarative. However, there will be a couple of questions which will somewhat qualitative.

There will not be a formal instructor, but, if the technology allows, I would like to find a way to provide individual feedback to learners after they complete the essay questions.

Tools

I will be using the courseware authoring tool, Chameleon, to build my course. There are assessment tools built into the software, which will allow me to have multiple choice/answer, hotspot, and image-based question types, as well as essay questions. Using these methods, I can assess the declarative knowledge of my learners, and provide an outlet for them to express some of their procedural knowledge.

For example, I can ask learners to choose a plant (from a list of options) that would best suit a particular environment. I could also ask learners to choose a specific plant, from a selection of images of different plants. As an example of an essay question, I plan to ask learners to describe some features of and facts about a plant of their choice.

In this example assessment, using Chameleon, I demonstrate three of the available question types. (The essay question is not technically part of the quiz component.)

Questionnaire

• What did you like about this course?
• What impressions or pieces of information stick with you after completing this course?
• What, if anything, was confusing or difficult about this course (either the material or the technology)?
• How did you feel about the timing of this course? (E.g. too slow, too drawn out, moving from topic to topic too quickly, etc.)
• What suggestions do you have for improvement of this course?
• What suggestions do you have for further training on this topic? Suggestions can be related to content, technology, or both.)