As our semester crawled into the second week and I began to enter scores and feedback for the students’ first assignment–a blog post–I noticed a couple unusual features:

1. When a student submits an URL for an assignment, Instructure grabs a screenshot of the rendered URL in addition to providing a hyperlink. This ensures that students actually have completed what they claim to have completed at the time of submission.
2. Students and instructors can each reply to an assignment’s score and feedback seamlessly within the system. For instance, after I submitted scores for this first assignment, one student explained in the assignment feedback why I failed to notice that she had in fact completed the assignment. I confirmed this, changed her score, and replied back, much like I would in private e-mail, but without any of the hassle of opening a message, choosing an addressee, etc.

Not only is this feedback discussion feature both seamless and the default, I can also use a built-in rubric, attach individual files (though Instructure has an even better way to upload assignment feedback en masse) and even record audio feedback inline (uses a Flash-based plug-in [still buggy for me on Win 7 in FF3]).

This is a great way to negotiate feedback and scoring with students. This also provides an opportunity for learners to engage in the assessment process. And since the features on this particular tool are easy and even intuitive to use, there is no excuse for accurate, timely corrective feedback that is understood by both instructor and learner.

Not only do I disagree with the instructor’s desired objectives in using this survey (she essentially hopes to prove that the reason students are failing her online course is because they are under-prepared or have wrong assumptions about online education–of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the course has nearly no media-enhanced learning, no student-student contact, and very little student-instructor interaction), I disagree with the questions that I wrote.

Of course anyone who has written survey questions with a mind to gain accurate and insightful information on the participants knows what a challenge the task is from the get-go; I don’t kid myself that it’s no easy endeavor, but I also think there has to be a better way.

Among my primary objectives in writing the questions were the following ideas:

• Keep the survey short, so that students would actually do it.
• Have some redundancy to check for accuracy and inhibit prejudicial responses.
• Avoid asking questions that dare students to label themselves “dumb”.
• Avoid questions that tempted students into labeling themselves “smart”.

But the primary objective was essentially this: after reading a good number of “student readiness” surveys online I wanted to avoid asking questions that gauged a student’s willingness to partake in a lonesome independent study course. “Independent study” is not equivalent to modern “distance education” in the Stein dictionary (in fact, even “distance education” is not equivalent to “distance education” in the Stein dictionary, but that’s another story). And so though several of my questions are based on the questions asked in other “distance education” surveys, I purposefully steered away from presumptive questions like:

Feeling that I am part of a class is:
a. Not particularly necessary to me.
b. Somewhat important to me.
c. Very important to me.

As if being “part of a class” is somehow mutually exclusive from distance learning! And it’s not that I’m opposed to independent study types of courses; in fact, I myself greatly enjoy and grow in isolation, but I recognize that’s not necessarily the norm.

Then there are questions that perpetuate instructors’ presumptions that they can get back to distance students at their leisure:

My comfort level with waiting a few days to receive instructor feedback is..
Low   Moderate   High

While it may be an unfortunate reality in distance education programs that instructors do often delay responding to students (I recommend a 24 hour turn around at the latest), we certainly don’t want to encourage that behavior, nor do we want to discourage student expectations of their instructors.

Finally, I also have disagreements with the term “student readiness” in general, as that tends to automatically place the blame for student failure at the feet of the students. Jared Spool, a Web usability expert whom I greatly admired, once inspired me to make the following provocative paraphrase, There are no user errors, only
design errors. And while I recognize that this statement is not universally true, it does challenge the designer (in this case, the instructor or the instructor’s instructional designer) to reconsider blaming the user (aka student) for failing to complete the task.

My Questions

Even though I have a pretty good insight into what I think is wrong with so many “student readiness” surveys, I still had a hard time making my fundamentally different. But I’ll share them here anyway, with the hopes that some brainy folks can offer better suggestions to achieve the same general objective: determine if our students are adequately prepared–both mentally and technically–for an online course experience.

(Note: these questions are randomized in the final survey to mask redundancy.)

Options: Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
1. I often get things done ahead of time.
2. I can work independently and meet deadlines without being reminded.
3. I learn best through live classroom discussions.
4. I am comfortable engaging in class discussions on the Web.
5. If given clear instructions, I am confident that I can complete the assignment independently.
6. I often need to have instructions for an assignment clarified or explained more than once.
7. As a reader, I sometimes need help to understand the text.
8. When I need help understanding the subject, I am comfortable e-mailing an instructor to ask for clarification.
9. When I don’t understand something I’ve read, I ask the instructor to explain it as soon as possible.
10. I am very competent using e-mail and Web sites.
11. I am a skilled writer.
12. I don’t always comprehend what I read.
13. I expect to spend less time on an Distance Education course than a regular on-campus course.
14. I often put things off until the last minute
15. I expect a Distance Education course to be easier than a regular on-campus course.

If you hate these questions, give me something better.

And if you like them, you can download them here (This survey is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.):

• DE Readiness Survey (survey).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Survey version
• DE Readiness Survey (quiz).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Quiz version (scored for a “perfect” student)
• DE Readiness Survey.txt Moodle GIFT format (scored for a “perfect” student)