Diane D. Chapman

Measurement of Outcomes in Virtual Environments

Virtual human resource development (VHRD) creates a virtual environment (Bennett, 2009). As virtual environments become pervasive as instructional and learning spaces, evidence of their effectiveness is still in the early stages of development. As these learning spaces gain acceptance and adoption in HRD practice, more comprehensive and strategic approaches to evaluation are needed. Through a study of literature and qualitative case study, the authors investigate evaluation practices used in virtual worlds, and discuss how they are relevant to VHRD. Although many traditional forms of assessment are still being utilized, findings indicate that virtual worlds offer the opportunity to incorporate richer and more authentic forms of assessment, particularly, when evaluating learning artifacts.

Queering the HRD Curriculum: Preparing Students for Success in the Diverse Workforce:

The problem and the solution . Although human resource development (HRD) programs frequently place value on embracing diversity and contributing to social change, seldom do curricula contain course work focused on issues of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) communities. Thus, HRD practitioners may not have skills or insights needed to support LGBT inclusion in the workplace. The authors look to HRD literature and their experiences to explore the implications of self-disclosure for instructors and students in HRD courses and the benefits of incorporating LGBT issues in the curriculum as an HRD intervention. Implications concerning identity management, marginalization, community building, and visibility are discussed.The article concludes with practical insights for HRD faculty on how queering the curriculum can be accomplished.

New Learning: a different way of approaching conference evaluation

New Learning (NL) is an innovative process aimed at collaborative learning in professional and scholarly events and is a new way of approaching evaluation at professional conferences. NL is a process integral to a conference that focuses on the learner and how and what they learn, rather than on presenters and presentations. Whereas most professional conferences claim learning as a primary objective, seldom do any structure or evaluate to maximize that objective. The NL process helps to structure and assess organizational learning as a primary outcome in addition to providing avenues for collection of traditional evaluation information. This article explains the NL process, reviews the literature of learning and evaluation, describes what NL is and how it works, and then compares and contrasts it with traditional evaluation methods and theory. It concludes with implications for future applications and research for NL.

How a research conference created new learning: a case study

Purpose – The study presents preliminary findings from research begun at the 2005 Academy of Human Resource Development International Research Conference held in Estes Park, CO, USA. The qualitative case study captures what new learning occurred as a result of the conference and how the new learning at the conference occurred.Design/methodology/approach – The qualitative case study used conceptual foundations grounded within critical theory and focused on learning organizations, communities of practice (CoP), and knowledge generation.Findings – Participant reactions documented on approximately 1,000 data forms were categorized for this preliminary study as critical perspectives on HRD where typically underrepresented voices critiqued the conference, CoP as relationships between theory and practice where participants reported that theory to practice was a rich research topic, and learning organizations where results indicated that the academy benefits through conferences in terms of creating a learning org...

Automating Individualized Formative Feedback in Large Classes Based on a Directed Concept Graph

Student learning outcomes within courses form the basis for course completion and time-to-graduation statistics, which are of great importance in education, particularly higher education. Budget pressures have led to large classes in which student-to-instructor interaction is very limited. Most of the current efforts to improve student progress in large classes, such as “learning analytics,” (LA) focus on the aspects of student behavior that are found in the logs of Learning Management Systems (LMS), for example, frequency of signing in, time spent on each page, and grades. These are important, but are distant from providing help to the student making insufficient progress in a course. We describe a computer analytical methodology which includes a dissection of the concepts in the course, expressed as a directed graph, that are applied to test questions, and uses performance on these questions to provide formative feedback to each student in any course format: face-to-face, blended, flipped, or online. Each student receives individualized assistance in a scalable and affordable manner. It works with any class delivery technology, textbook, and learning management system.

That Truly Meant a Lot to Me: A Qualitative Examination of Meaningful Faculty-Student Interactions.

The majority of research on faculty-student interaction has been primarily quantitative to date and has focused primarily on determining what kinds of interactions students have with faculty. This study furthers the literature on faculty-student interaction, taking a qualitative approach to examine what types of interactions with faculty students find meaningful. Our findings indicate that students appreciate the types of interactions that research shows benefits them the most, suggesting that there is less of a disconnect between the types of faculty behaviors that benefit students and the types of faculty behaviors that students appreciate than many might assume.