Group items tagged

This article discusses a proposed system to evaluate educational technology products and provide the information to decision makers. They are proposing that the project be started with grant funds and them move to a fee based funding system. My questions would be - 1) Who would evaluate the products? 2) Would a fee based system lead to any sort of bias? - particularly since the creators propose a sliding fee scale based on the size of the company.

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a scale used to assess in-class use of laptops in higher education. The Laptop Evaluation Scale consisted of four constructs: academic use, non-academic communication, playing games, and watching movies. All scale items showed acceptable internally reliability. A principal components factor analysis demonstrated good construct validity. Correlation among the LES constructs were significant but small enough to support the existence of four distinct constructs. All four LES constructs were correlated with average grade, time spent on non-academic activities, and perceptions of laptop helpfulness in class, thereby proving evidence for convergent validity. Finally, content validity was supported by frequencies of laptop behaviours reported as well as student comments. However, student comments indicate that the content of the LES may need to be expanded to include more specific academic and non-academic behaviours.