Presented at EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences and Assessment and Evaluation

Curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy, when linked with good assessment strategies, provide excellent measures of teaching and learning effectiveness. Technology enables the use of universal design principles to address different learning styles and rates and methods of expression. The session will discuss the importance of accessible design concepts regarding assessment tools and instruments.

Whether initiating or advancing learning space design, efforts to bring together space, technology, and pedagogy for learner success have sufficiently matured to reveal a set of principles for engaging in the process. Through presentations, activities, and discussion, we will explore how to apply these principles and will determine a methodology for initiating, assessing, and advancing learning space design appropriate for your institutional context.

The workshop will be divided into four topics: What do I want? How do I get it? How do I support it? Does it work? For each topic, you will learn about trends and issues and explore examples from existing learning spaces. This seminar will provide you with principles and frameworks within which to understand the larger issues, as well as an opportunity to begin to apply these concepts to your home institution through a series of hands-on activities and discussions.

The Open Source Portfolio (OSP), which began as a student-centered tool promoting student learning and providing opportunities for career development and reflection, also offers features that make it an essential tool for value-added assessment, program improvement, and accreditation. This session will offer perspectives from several campuses concerning these OSP applications.

Recent advances in both technology and cognitive science have given birth to new possibilities for design of diagnostic educational assessment systems effective for measuring student learning. In this session, we will present an innovative assessment design project at Arizona State University that brings cutting-edge test development models to university faculty.

This session will discuss the methods and preliminary results of the first and second steps of a three-step process for assessing a survey's validity. The survey of interest was designed to expand on McVay (2000, 2001) and Bernard et al. (2004), as well as examine learner characteristics and technology capabilities of online students.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha is engaged in shifting campus culture from teaching to learning through the adoption of myMAPP-mapping academic performance through e-portfolios-an innovative e-portfolio system that addresses how all parts of an institution contribute to the continuous improvement of learning.

Routine in business, data mining has unrealized potential in education. Sophisticated educational media enable the collection of rich data streams about individual learners. Analyzing these data streams could yield formative, diagnostic information about student performance (including real-time feedback to teachers) and research findings about student behavior and learning. Session presenters will share their work exploring the educational potentials of data mining.

The Higher Education TechQual+ Project is a nationwide effort to develop a standardized approach to outcomes-based, service-quality assessments. The instrument is delivered through the Web, shielding participants from the complexities of survey research. The presentation will cover project history, the instrument, and assessment and reporting functionality, as well as case studies of its use at several institutions.

Approximately a year ago, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education formed by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued its report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, which called for dramatic improvement in the national higher education system. Focusing on issues of access, affordability, quality, and accountability, the report outlined significant shortcomings and recommended sweeping changes. Our panelists, all members of the commission, will address issues raised in the report and the role technology can play in support of the recommendations.

Clickers. Podcasting. Second Life. How does a university choose which emerging technologies to pursue? This session will share Ohio State University's structured process for evaluating e-learning projects, the emerging technologies assessment (ETA), which has been tested in numerous projects. Through collaboration and role-play, participants will conduct a case study assessment of an emerging technology using the ETA toolkit.

The five-stage process is organized around a flowchart that details steps for taking an emerging technology from the idea stage through the information-gathering stage to planning and executing a pilot. It specifies stakeholder involvement and includes multiple checkpoints that permit early termination where appropriate. The end result is a recommendation to administrative leadership about whether to adopt the technology. The materials for this session will include documentation, examples, and forms that outline the goals, inputs, and outputs for each stage of the process. Participants will leave with a model they can adapt to their own institutions.