This one year project has been funded by the US Department of Energy to develop and evaluate a new methodology for performing both formative and summative evaluations of educational telecommunications. The last five years of this century and the first five years of the next will witness profound changes in the way we communicate as citizens, as clients, as professional colleagues and as teachers and learners. The communications technologies that are now beginning to be available to our nation's schools will have a profound effect on the process of education. Yet, despite the surging interest in the information infrastructure and growing financial investments in it, there is a dearth of systematic and large-scale research into the effects of these communications technologies on teaching and learning. This project begins initial work on developing a set of evaluation instruments that educational networking projects can use to collect and interpret information on how networking resources are being used and how that usage evolves over time.
By producing a standard set of instruments and techniques, even relatively small projects can compare and contrast their results with regional and national data and add their findings to a larger context. This project uses two on-line science education projects currently operated by the Department of Energy as the testing environment for data collection and analysis tools which will then be made more widely available in proposed follow on efforts after this first year.
The Footprints System includes three main components:
1. An administration module for use by researchers or project managers. This module allows the user to register users, add workstations, and modify questions to be used by the Footprints user client.
2. The user client works like a launch pad for up to seven applications of interest. The applications are added to the Footprint client and then can be accessed from with the client. This produces a tracking record of who, how long, how much data sent and received for the session and the applications used within the session. It is also possible to have the user answer question(s) before and after the session.
3. An Oracle DBMS application which collects information automatically sent from clients, notes which project the data belongs to, and files in the appropriate record format. This module also contains report generation tools to allow researchers to view accumulated data in various ways.
Index of additional documents::
For more information, send e-mail to Robert Spielvogel.