Point 14: DO IT!

[TQNELSON@aol.com]

One of the key concepts of WED was the practice of leadership integrity. He 
embodied this in his 14th point, which we might phrase as, "Now that you know 
all this 'stuff' you can't just leave it as an intellectual exercise. You 
need to DO IT!"

Well, when you do, as many messages have reported, you might plan to "hit the 
waves" of opposition. Then, as a great book title says, "Feel the Fear, and 
Do It Anyway."

Case for me:

1. There is a movement underway in the online education community to "rate 
and rank" and give gold stars to Internet education sites. The first message 
that follows spells this out,

2. The second message is from me setting forth my basic (and rather obvious?) 
opposition to the entire concept of the rating, ranking, gold star nonsense. 
We have a long way to go.

Message 1:

Subj:    FW: Merlot Project Brings Peer Review to Web Materials for Teaching
Date:   6/1/2000 10:55:39 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From:   jgeorges@elcamino.cc.ca.us (Joseph Georges)
To: CVC@cvc.edu

This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: jgeorges@cvc.edu
_________________________________________________________________

   Thursday, June 1, 2000


   Merlot Project Brings Peer Review to Web Materials for Teaching

   By JEFFREY R. YOUNG


   If your peers reviewed your course Web site, how would it rate on a 
scale of 1 to 5?

   You might soon find out, thanks to a new guide to online    teaching 
materials that is systematically rating academic Web sites -- and allowing 
users to add their own comments. The guide, called Merlot, already lists 
nearly 3,000 items, but the professors involved in the project are only now 
beginning to evaluate and rate the sites.

In addition to deciding which sites get five stars and which get less praise, 
reviewers also give detailed reports about    each site. Authors of the 
materials are notified when their sites are up for review, and they are given 
a chance to improve the sites based on reviewers' comments.

The Merlot project was conceived last year as a collaboration among the 
California State University system, the University System of Georgia, the 
University of North Carolina system, the Oklahoma State Regents, and the 
State Higher Education
Executive Officers, a national association. The universities have provided 
release time or stipends to the professors who serve as content reviewers.

The project's founders have set up a not-for-profit corporation to administer 
Merlot, and they are recruiting other institutions to participate. Sixteen 
more institutions
are considering committing resources to the project, says Gerard L. Hanley, 
acting senior director for academic technology at the C.S.U. system.

"I believe Merlot is the only project that is attempting to evaluate the 
quality of learning objects," says Rhonda Epper, a Merlot leader who is a 
project director for the State Higher Education Executive Officers. "It's 
hard for professors to find good material out there in any kind of context 
that makes sense to use in their courses."

The plan is to form 12-member review teams for each discipline. So far, 
however, only four teams have been chosen, in biology, physics, teacher 
education, and business.

The review process is modeled on the way peer review is done for academic 
journals. Three reviewers working in the site's discipline review each 
teaching element. The reviewers consider three major factors: quality of the 
content, potential effectiveness as a teaching-and-learning tool, and ease of 
use.

The guide focuses on pieces of course Web sites, or "modules," rather than 
sites as a whole. The idea is that professors might want to incorporate those 
modules into their own course Web sites. Materials reviewed include visual 
simulations, animations, tutorials, and exercises.

Materials that get high ratings come up first when visitors use Merlot's 
search engine. And Merlot's leaders plan to recognize professors who have 
developed excellent sites by mailing notices to their department heads.

"If you spend a lot of time working on a module, then you should get some 
credit for it," says Cathy Owens Swift, a professor of marketing at Georgia 
Southern University who is one of Merlot's reviewers. "People spend a lot of 
time developing modules, but nobody else ever sees them except their 
students."

So far, only a handful of sites have been peer-reviewed. One example is a 
physics Web module, created at the University of Oregon, that demonstrates 
the concept of thermodynamic equilibrium. The module is a Java applet -- a 
small computer program that can run inside a Web browser -- that shows how 
gas particles move at different temperatures. Reviewers gave it four stars.

"The graphical nature of this material is excellent [and] useful for 
developing conceptual understanding," reviewers wrote. The reviewers also 
list "points of concern" for every module. For the physics module, they noted 
other features that
might be added to improve the teaching tool.

Merlot is not the only guide to academic Web sites. Among other large efforts 
to catalog course Web sites are the University of Texas World Lecture Hall 
and WebCT's E-Learning Hub. And many scholarly associations and other groups 
have
developed guides to course materials in specific subjects. Those sites 
generally don't assign ratings to resources, however.
 
 Jessica A. Somers, who is director of academic innovation at the University 
System of Georgia and who is working on Merlot, says that several professors 
were hesitant about the idea of a rating system. Some of the reviewers are 
considering withholding reviews that earn only one or two stars, as a way of 
not criticizing professors who have taken the time to develop course 
materials.

But Ms. Swift says that the ratings will make the site more useful than it 
would be without them.

"It may not sound very academic," she says, "But at least it gives people an 
opportunity to say, 'This looks like a good one,' or, 'This may not be very 
good.'"

MESSAGE 2

Subj:    Re: FW: Merlot Project Brings Peer Review to Web Materials for 
Teaching
Date:   6/3/2000 1:17:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From:   TQNELSON@aol.com
To: jgeorges@elcamino.cc.ca.us, CVC@cvc.edu

An insult to the very name of Merlot. A great wine, and a rotten approach to 
"rating."

Feedback? Help? Great! But "Gold stars and ratings?"

Why don't we just have a lottery? Need further reasoning? Check out my paper 
on the nonsense of such "grading" at 
http://deming.ces.clemson.edu/pub/den/dnelson01.htm

Del Nelson
American River College

(Stands right in line with the emphasis on Standardized Tests for students, 
simply "Charmin!")

And the results? The attack has already begun.
Charge! Do It Anyway!

Del Nelson
American River College

When "We, the people...."
are replaced by dollar$, profit$, and greed
it is time to start over
=======================================================================