Test-retest revisited

Unfortunately, we only had 18 people take both the first and the second surveys, and of those, only 14 were valid for use in the test-retest because four were not complete. Typically, 30+ participants are required to have enough for parametric statistical analyses to be considered appropriate. What you really need is a normally distributed sample (whether there are 30 or 3000), and below 30 introduces a greater chance of either not getting that normal distribution or of greater degrees of error creeping into the statistics because of the effects of outliers (people that scored items particularly high or particularly low). Unfortunately, many folks that review articles submitted to journals just stick with that magic number of 30+ without really understanding why, which means that I have to bark up another tree re: validation procedures.

In any event, the two-way correlation of subscale scores on tests and retests was 0.74 at the 0.001 significance level. That's a strong positive correlation with normally distributed samples, which mean that it really looks pretty good. Many thanks to those who helped with this!

The instrument itself revealed a very interesting finding. People who answered generally positive statements about online learning positively tended to answer generally positive statements about face-to-face learning negatively, and vice versa. I didn't make them this way, but two subscales emerged on the instrument around the two sets of items (10 online and 10 face-to-face) and those subscale responses has strong negative relationships. In fact, they were so strongly correlated (positively or negatively), that we can predict up to 40% of the score of one subscale just by looking at the other subscale! This may seem obvious to those of you who feel that you are definitely a "face-to-face person" or an "online person," but it's not the current thinking in the ed tech world.

Now what should I do with all of this...?

Finished grading M2!

Wow - that was a whoooole lot of reading and grading, but I'm finally finished! (for now)

The GIDPs that you are putting together are impressive! Over the past few days I have seen many innovative ideas presented on lovely websites - all of which (as far I can tell) are completely free. This means that nobody here will have to rely on institutionally purchased software packages such as Blackboard to conduct distance learning. Not only are these services expensive for universities, they typically do not provide the robust features of a more eclectic choice of software. Kudos to all for such wonderful use of available technology!

The only thing I found with a number of projects that might need some attention is a lack of clarity on how students will be interacting with instructors. Student-student and student-content interaction is quite well represented, but with many projects there was no clear design for student-teacher interaction (STI). STI can take a bunch of forms, of course, from discussion to lecture to email and so forth, but one thing that's important is for the interaction to go both ways, so a lecture that does not include opportunities for questions (e.g., one included as a voice-over PPT online) does not satisfy this requirement. I would encourage everyone to take a look at their projects and clearly identify the ways that STI occurs. You may need to make some minor edits to beef up this component of the GIDP. 

Again, overall these were great, and the class is doing a great job! I look forward to seeing the final products emerge over the next week or so. Speaking of, we are in the home stretch now, so everyone hang on for a little longer and we'll be finished!

It's good to be back home. :D

Google Wave looks very cool

Check it out. I am looking forward to this one. Consider all of the educational possibilities for online courses. Perhaps I should include it in the Fall 5263 course...

Side note: I wanted badly to invest in Google stock when it was $160 earlier this year (presently $452), but did not do so because of potential conflict of interest in requiring my students to use the services when I might be benefitting from their traffic (trivially, perhaps, but you know how the US legal system is). This is something to consider for those of you who both invest in technology and use it in your courses.