Margaret Rangecroft

Evaluation and the invisible student: theories, practice and problems in evaluating distance education provision

Making sure that a higher education distance learning course meets student expectations is critical to ensuring the quality of the student experience. Judging whether a course delivers to its promise is a particular challenge when the course is delivered by distance learning and there is no regular face‐to‐face contact with students, the more so when courses are faced with alternative conceptions, and external audits, of quality. The paper identifies the contested nature of quality, examines models of evaluation, relates them to existing forms of evaluation facing education courses, and offers an alternative constructivist approach based on the notion of a service template.

The Language of Statistics

Summary The discussion of problems associated with the use of language, specifically vocabulary and symbolism, is extended from the teaching and learning of mathematics to the particular area of statistics.

The Evaluation of Course Quality Through a Service Template

This article reports on initial findings of the Template Project, a project researching ways of evaluating post-graduate courses offered through the medium of distance education. It has taken an evaluation tool from industry and re-designed it so that it can apply to distance education courses. The question as to whether or not a tool initially located in the service industries is appropriate for education is examined as are the alternative paradigms of evaluation. A Popperian approach to evaluation is offered as the paradigm within which the Template Projects approach to evaluation should be located.

Bridging the Gap: An Alternative Tool for Course Evaluation. Case Study

The increasing perception of students as customers of services puts a stronger focus on improving the quality of the student experience. Satisfaction with aspects of service, such as access, flexibility and fitness for purpose can be assessed through student feedback questionnaires. The results of these surveys may not immediately suggest strategies for making improvement. How to bridge any gaps between what students look for and what they experience requires knowledge of student expectations and experiences separately. This paper describes an alternative evaluation tool, QUEST, based on a service template approach and explains how it has been used for evaluating the level of student satisfaction with HE distance education courses. QUEST is web‐based and produces a measure of satisfaction for a range of service quality aspect of the course provision. The results can be interrogated at several layers of detail to produce a clear picture of where issues arise and to identify how they might be addressed. The paper describes how these outputs from an evaluation might be interpreted to suggest strategies for improving the fit between what students look for from a particular course of study and what they experience.