Goal Aware Data Point Tool and System Adoption
Last I had heard, our enterprise courseware system on campus (not Sakai) was used in about 30% of the classes. It is a very big job to get faculty to learn enough about courseware to jump onboard. It isn't required that faculty use any courseware at all at Syracuse University. It is a centralized service provided to faculty that find value in it.
The Goal Aware tools built on the Sakai platform are intended to be a better means to collect student performance data from faculty to support ongoing program assessment. The college’s current assessment system relies heavily on many hours of paper shuffling, emails, spreadsheet manipulation and centralized, manual data entry to gather each semester's data from each class. Use of the Goal Aware tools would allow the workload to be distributed among the faculty, reduce chances for error during data entry and save time. This would be true, however, only if the tools were widely adopted. 30% would not do. Success will only come at a much higher adoption rate.
We recognize that convincing faculty to switch (or adopt) a courseware platform has traditionally not been an easy task. The Data Point tool is a very simple tool that does not require students to be involved in the process at all. Deployment of this tool by itself, without any courseware or collaboration tools, into course worksites turns Sakai into a data collection tool and requires no student use or course design at all in this software. Later, if faculty feel comfortable with Data Point, perhaps the Goal Aware Assignment tool would appeal to them. By not requiring faculty to use or switch courseware, I hope we increase the likelihood of widespread adoption of the tools.
The Goal Aware tools built on the Sakai platform are intended to be a better means to collect student performance data from faculty to support ongoing program assessment. The college’s current assessment system relies heavily on many hours of paper shuffling, emails, spreadsheet manipulation and centralized, manual data entry to gather each semester's data from each class. Use of the Goal Aware tools would allow the workload to be distributed among the faculty, reduce chances for error during data entry and save time. This would be true, however, only if the tools were widely adopted. 30% would not do. Success will only come at a much higher adoption rate.
We recognize that convincing faculty to switch (or adopt) a courseware platform has traditionally not been an easy task. The Data Point tool is a very simple tool that does not require students to be involved in the process at all. Deployment of this tool by itself, without any courseware or collaboration tools, into course worksites turns Sakai into a data collection tool and requires no student use or course design at all in this software. Later, if faculty feel comfortable with Data Point, perhaps the Goal Aware Assignment tool would appeal to them. By not requiring faculty to use or switch courseware, I hope we increase the likelihood of widespread adoption of the tools.