Research, Research, Research

Today has been a day of extensive research. I am currently looking at different evaluation rubrics that are out there to form a basis of what my rubric will look like. The best rubric I seem to have found so far is from California State University (Chico). The rubric has 6 different categories that cover pretty much every component of a course as well as the design itself.

I have found a number of different universities with rubrics offered, however as I go through them I notice they are the same categories in the CSU Chico rubric. When I finally reach the end of the report, I see that they sourced this rubric for their own. I think it will provide me with the best base to get started, however I don't want to just use the same exact standards (and I'm sure it's not acceptable here either). I really want to use what I think is best and try to improve from there if possible.

As far as my three courses to evaluate, I have figured out two of the three. I am researching different courses for learning the Portuguese language as I am in Brazil. The first course I will evaluate is a software package, Rosetta Stone. I just recently started using the course myself to help improve my Portuguese, so it will be nice to evaluate it. The other course I will look at is the offerings at busuu.com. I will look into a third one the rest of the day today, and hopefully be able to go into a little more detail about all them in the next few days. I hope everyone else has had great results in their projects thus far and enjoyed the holidays!

- Tim

Introduction

Welcome. My name is Tim Schwichtenberg. This blog is dedicated to updating my progress on my final project for IDT516 Fall 2010 at Western Illinois University.