Evaluating your online education strategy allows you to set it up so your efforts will lead you to achieve your elearning goals. Just like a business uses a strategy to keep themselves ahead of the game, it has the same importance in your learning initiatives. It will help you approach your lesson plans in a systematic way and it lessens the chance of you making a mistake. Not only that, it allows you to progress more efficiently as you create the courses and learning materials that will help educate all the participants. This is not just something that you will use at the beginning of the course creation process. It is the backbone that will be followed throughout the learning process. It is also a tool that you can use to improve whatever it is that you are already using in your online courses.
If you design your strategy well, you can implement it properly. But before you can do that, you have to evaluate your strategy to ensure that it is well-designed. Here are tips that will help you evaluate your online education strategy so it meets your expectations.
- Start by knowing your primary goals. Your strategy will always be aligned with your primary goal. After all, the strategy will help you achieve your goals. That means the goal will help you to create the criteria for this evaluation. For instance, the online course is all about learning to budget. Your strategy should be to help the learners develop budgeting skills and discover the techniques that will allow them to implement it in their lives.
- Get a second opinion. Another thing that you need to do is to get a second opinion for the online education strategy. This will help you determine if your strategy is correct and if it is understood by someone with a different perspective. Have someone look it over to give you technical and expert feedback about the course.
- Ask the feedback of your target audience. The target audience is a reliable source when it comes to evaluating your online course strategy. You can get it through surveys or questionnaires that will help you identify if the tools and methods you used gave the learners what they needed from the course. Their answers will allow you to gauge if your strategy worked or not.
- Check how the learners are applying what they got from the online education. This evaluation can be done during the learning process. You can setup an assessment in the midst of the course to check if the learners are progressing along as intended. If not, then you may have to revise something in your online education strategy. The best test, however, is in real life situations. How are these learners applying what they got from the course in their daily lives?
- Compare the learners that succeeded and those that did not. Group the learners that breezed through the course and those that encountered difficulties. Analyze what caused the difference in the results. Was it because of their learning strategies? Or was there some confusion along the way? You may have to create different strategies within the course to help increase the effectiveness of the course despite the differences among the learners.
Going through all of these will help you check if your online education strategy is effective and if it can meet your elearning goals. If it is too late to revise the existing course, you can at least use your finding to improve your future courses.
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