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Not in agreement with the 'taskmaster' element but I have similar concerns about teaching evaluations. "Michele Pellizzari, an economics professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has a more serious claim: that course evaluations may in fact measure, and thus motivate, the opposite of good teaching. "

"At the college where I serve as president, we do evaluate student work; we just use a higher-quality method. Our students receive written evaluations not only on every assignment, but also for every course and learning activity. These evaluations are designed to be formative teaching tools."

This is a government website, but does provide insight into planning and evaluating training.

Evaluation is such an important part of designing and developing programs for adult learners. This site may be helpful.

Highly recommend this book. Kirkpatrick is the "king" of evaluations! (in my field anyway:)

Site has its problems but the simple frame is interesting: imagine, design, create, deliver, evaluate.

I like the concept- maybe inspiration, creation, evaluation.

"Student feedback about the use of Twitter was uniformly positive. Only one student suggested an improvement and requested more frequent study tweets. Examples of student evaluation comments included: "I LOVED the Twitter questions! It was something that kept me studying all semester." "I really liked the Twitter 'snack learning.' I only wish there were more 'tweets' covering more topics. It was a nice review to go over to prepare for comps. . . . Twitter is a good way to reach students during the day to give us something to think about.""

"The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman named Zenaida Tan. Up until that report, she was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess). In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education. This raises an important point. As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today's loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time"

"Some may consider online learning to be the anti-classroom.  A rebellion against the chalkboard and the Blackboard in favor of virtual classrooms, avatars in sweater vests lecturing in a Charlie Brown monotone…  I simply look at it as a different kind of team approach to learning.  More opportunities for inputs.  If anything, it makes the scholarship more rigorous.  As both teachers and students, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide behind airs of academia when the scholarship can be researched, published, evaluated and revised in a nano-second.  It makes educational leadership even more important when the skills necessary to synthesize information both in person and on line are changing, and changing quickly."

"Online Learning, like any educational tool, requires utilization, evaluation, reflection and modification.  We cannot engage in that process unless we actually DO IT. "

"A major affordance of video is the ability to produce multimedia elements and create dynamic learning artifacts. This may be self-evident, yet often instructional videos are produced without much design devoted to sound or imagery. Students repeatedly described the audio/visual elements of video as useful aspects of online course videos. Throughout the interviews, all participants evaluated charts, graphs, photographs, and other visuals relevant to the content area in positive terms. Conversely, a couple of students voiced their dissatisfaction with videos that they did not perceive as a value-add over text (they said videos they viewed did not include useful audio/visuals and that they could have just as easily read a transcript for the same information)."

Another good article on assessment

Quoting Mr. Russell from the introduction to his book,

"These studies tell me that there is nothing inherent in the technologies that elicits improvements in learning. Having said that, let me reassure you that difference in outcomes can be made more positive by adapting the content to the technology. That is, in going through the process of redesigning a course to adapt the content to the technology, it can be improved."

This idea is reflected in the history of the No Significant Difference literature. Over the last 50 years, the question for media comparison studies (MCS) has evolved from, "Can students learn at a distance?" to "What is the effect of distance delivery on student outcomes?" Over the years, especially since the internet revolution, the conviction that distance delivery is necessarily inferior to face to face instruction has faded a bit. As we accept that it is not the technology itself, but the application of technology, that has the potential to affect learning, it is our hope that future research will strive to identify the instructional methods that best utilize technology attributes to improve student outcomes.

This is an old paper regarding needs assessment, but may be helpful if you are designing non-credit training programs

focuses on Moodle but has some interesting points on the general effect of course introduction videos on online student engagement/participation "Studies point to an introductory course video from the instructor welcoming students as being able to cause shifts in course evaluations and discussion postings. For that reason, instructors should consider creating short videos greeting the students"

Jody, I've used Moodle as a student. It's free and open source. You'd just need a place to host it. Not sure if AltLab does that--but they should! I liked it, but didn't do a ton with it. This might be useful: http://elearning.guru/which-learning-management-system-comparing-blackboard-canvas-moodle-part-1-course-content/

AH! Thank you, this is tremendous!

These accessibility tips are focused on ensuring individuals who are blind can use your resources, yet they can improve the experience of anyone using it!