Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ A Rubric for Evaluating E-Learning Tools in Higher Education

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The article delivers what it promises, a rubric for choosing educational technology. There's a link to a nice downloadable version - 7 page PDF. The rubric has some technical requirements, including mobile design, accessibility and functionality, and it has security and privacy requirements, and then along the educational dimension it invokes the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) model, adding rubrics related to social, teaching and cognitive presences. The rubric is course-based and includes 'playing well' with the institutional LMS, and it also has a condition that "requires that instructors be able to identify students." But will this rubric help you actually select e-learning technologies? It seems to me that most commercial products could satisfy all these criteria. My Nine Rules pose tougher criteria, my Network Design Principles tougher criteria still, especially principle 6, the 'Semantic Principle', looking for technology that promotes autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity. Maybe you don't like my approach, but you will need some more stringent principles than those captured in this rubric.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 04:02 a.m.

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