Criteria for TELEs: this and that ...

Do you know the feeling?

You’ve worked on a number of assignments, you have been developing some kind of (digital) product … And after some days, or after having seen twelve interesting tweets on the subject, you start doubting your work of a few days before? Not that is is per se bad or entirely wrong, but there is so many information out there. Consequence of the information overload, I guess.

Anyway, in this post I wrote about some criteria for evaluating a technology learning environment. I found it important to build upon the definition of p21.org. My line of thought was that a good definition should automatically point towards the criteria.

Then I came across this (pragmatic and elaborate) list of criteria for online courses. It was actually sitting in my Diigo library for some time. Waiting for the right time to pop up. Couldn’t it have popped up a week or two earlier? :-)

http://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/ID/evaluatingcourses.pdf

It is actually an extension of what I was thinking about in the previous post and diagram. So I added the more pragmatic criteria to the diagram.


What are the criteria by which TELEs can be evaluated?

In Wiki Task 1 - here and here - we looked at what Technology Enabled (Enhanced) Learning Environments (TELEs) are. The next step is to look at criteria for evaluating if and when a technology is a good TELE. Criteria are one of the most fundamental elements of making a high quality decision. Simply put, criteria are the way that you define success for a specific decision.1

Considering my definition in previous post, “Technology Learning environments are digital structures, tools, and communities where students and educators find inspiration and draw upon resources to make sense out of things, where they connect and construct meaningful solutions to problems in the 21st century.”  the criteria by which TELEs can be evaluated, are/should be included in this definition.

  1. TELEs feed inspiration;
  2. TELEs provide resources (easily);
  3. TELEs enhance  ‘meaning making’ on those resources;
  4. TELEs make it easy  to connect to others (humans and nonhumans);
  5. TELEs enable problem-solving for relevant 21st Century problems.