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ONLINE LEARNING SUPPORT VENDORS WORK ON DEVELOPING TOOLS FOR
TRACKING AND REPORTING ON LEARNING OUTCOMES
Educational Pathways
talked briefly with two online learning support companies—eCollege
and Blackboard—about
each of their plans to provide a comprehensive tool that
will track and report on learning outcomes.
Matthew Schnittman, president of eCollege’s eLearning
division, said that providing its client base of fully
online institutions with tools that can report rich data
analytics and assessment of learning outcomes "is something
that we have been focused on for a while."
Schnittman added that eCollege has four tools currently
being used by fully online education providers that will
eventually tie into a comprehensive Learning Outcome Manager
reporting system that is under development: a content
manager, a program intelligence manager, a portfolio system,
and an evaluation suite.
Director of Product Marketing at Blackboard Niel Allison
explained how a Blackboard Outcomes SystemTM is also under
development. "We identified four broad categories of
software solutions that address outcomes assessment:
enterprise survey and testing, assessment management,
student outcome planning and tracking, and institutional
research," said Allison.
Both companies claimed to have a unique approach to the
development of learning outcomes transparency tools that can
be used internally to improve and enhance online teaching
and learning within courses, programs and departments, as
well as for facilitating collaborations between
institutions. |
