Towards ecological evaluation of online courses: aiming for thick description

Evaluating postgraduate online courses needs to go beyond the market-driven surveys and output measures currently collected by universities and governments. Such approaches tend to isolate educational elements, such as student satisfaction, resulting in thin and ambiguous descriptions of curriculum implementation and functioning. We propose instead an ecological perspective, which takes account of a broad range of educational elements and the relations among them. This presents a promising direction for evaluation practice that can supplement existing standardised evaluation information with more useful and meaningful comprehensive accounts. Ecological evaluation distributes responsibility for course and programme functioning across institutions, teachers, students and the broader systems in which educational programmes are embedded. To realise this vision, we make a plea for ‘thicker descriptions’ that acknowledge active participation of students and teachers in shaping assemblages of designs, environments, purposes, ideas, tasks, people and other elements of education; many of these cannot meaningfully be separated from each other. Thick descriptions should incorporate knowledge derived from theory, pedagogy, conventions, or beliefs about what counts as success or failure. We provide examples from educational literature illustrating how evaluation of online courses can produce information that supports development of teaching and increases the formative value of evaluation.