ABSTRACT
Despite best efforts, technology-based innovations seem to have persistently avoided significant, innovative evaluation. Standard approaches, perhaps spiced with a Web-site survey of satisfaction (Kirkpatrick, 1994; Sugrue & Kim, 2004), dominate evaluation for those cases where evaluation rises to attention. Why is this so? Part of the problem is the speed of technology development, and the difficulty of conducting evaluations of learning as deadlines loom. But there may be other reasons, related to tradition, novelty, unrealized claims, or the obviousness of a good idea, that inhibit evaluation of Web-based learning environments. Web systems have not yet been caught up in the wave of results-based activity that has hit hard the schools, business, and the military, in spite of the availability of several versions of evaluation or accountability standards (e.g., Baker & Linn, 2004; Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1981; Stufflebeam, 2004). This chapter is intended to describe Web-based evaluation, how it could work, and at what points of entry the process may begin. Two preliminaries are required: First, we delimit the realm of Web-based learning so it is sensible to describe its evaluation approaches; second, we clarify the meanings we ascribe (but which vary by community) to common evaluation terms.
