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Motivation Students often have some very erroneous assumptions about online courses. They tend to think that online courses require less time than classroom-based courses (when usually the opposite is true). They might not feel comfortable expressing themselves in writing (which is a major part of online communication, unlike the classroom). They might not even have a reliable internet connection (yes, it's obvious: but every semester here at OU we have students in online courses who do not have a reliable internet connection ready to go at the beginning of the semester). In order to help students understand what is involved in taking an online course, we wanted to offer them an Online Readiness Assessment. This started out as a readiness assessment that I was doing for a particular course, and my colleague Karen Cozart helped me to adapt that assessment so that we could use it for all of our online courses here at OU. There are a number of online course readiness assessments available from various institutions, but we were unable to find one which asked the detailed questions that we wanted to include, and it did not seem that the available assessments were able to weight the questions. We decided to build our own Readiness Assessment, with weighted questions, and to include this Assessment as part of the mandatory Student Orientation for all online courses offered through OU's College of Arts & Sciences.
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Impact of Use on Teaching and Learning The Online Readiness Assessment is one element in the College's strategy to promote high completion rates for our online course students. The College is very concerned with retention rates in our online courses, and our latest figures show that approximately 90% of students who start our online courses successfully complete them. We believe that the mandatory Orientation, including the Online Readiness Assessment, is an important factor in this high rate of success.
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Background The College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Oklahoma offers a wide range of online courses, with student enrollment increasing every semester (over 1000 students will be enrolled in Spring 2005). In order to assist students in identifying whether or not they are ready for an online course, we developed an Online Readiness Assessment which assesses student readiness in three areas: Time Management, Technology, and Class Preferences. Students are required to take this assessment as part of the mandatory student Orientation for online courses. The assessment was prepared using Quandary software (by the folks at Hot Potatoes). The raw Quandary files are available for download for anyone who wishes to modify the assessment questions and scoring for their own use. Although we are not using the "branching" features of Quandary software, we are using its scorekeeping feature in order to weight the questions in the assessment. You can see exactly how the weighted questions work by looking at the paper-and-pencil version of the Assessment, which is also available online.
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Learning Activities The Online Readiness Assessment is part of a mandatory student Orientation which is required for all students enrolled in online courses offered by OU's College of Arts & Sciences. Students do not report their score. Instead, the score is an indication to them of problem areas to watch out for. Each question in the assessment is designed to prompt the student to think about the factors involved in taking online courses. Students can get advice and assistance with any concerns that they have using our Online Learning Resource Center. Because the Readiness Assessment is hosted at this website, students have easy access to the materials available online at the Resource Center at the same time that they are taking the Assessment.
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Tips for Teaching The Online Readiness Assessment can be used as is by any instructor or institution who would like to link to our website. The address for the Readiness Assessment is http://casweb.ou.edu/olr/starting/readiness However, it would probably be more effective for you to adapt the Assessment to the needs of your particular institution or your particular online course. Our Online Learning Resource Center provides you with the raw files that we used to create our version of the assessment, along with tips on how to modify those files in order to create your own assessment.
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Reflections We are very pleased with the Readiness Assessment and the role that it plays in our student Orientation. We do not have major plans to modify the Assessment at this time, although we could be glad to hear from anyone who is using the Assessment, or from anyone who has suggestions about how we can improve it. You can contact OU's College of Arts & Sciences online learning division at [email protected], or you can use the Contact Form at our website. We made a presentation at the MERLOT 2004 Conference on this topic; for more detailed information, you can read our Conference Presentation Notes online.
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Visit www.ou.edu/online to learn more about the University of Oklahoma's Online Learning Resource Center, created by the online learning staff in the College of Arts & Sciences. We hope that this can be a valuable resource for students, staff and faculty who are involved in online learning.
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