Timeline and Background

A timeline that details the on-going development of the barometer concept at Webfuse.

June 1999: Discovering the Barometer Concept

Attending EdMedia'99, a conference on educational applications of multimedia and online technologies, the barometer concept is discovered for the first time in a paper presented by some academics from Sweeden.

Lars Svensson, Robert Andersson, Magnus Gadd, Anders Johnsson, Course Barometers: Compensating for the loss of informal feedback in distance education, Proceedings of EdMedia'99, Seattle, Washington

June 1999: The First Webfuse Barometers

Based on the Sweedish barometer the Webfuse course barometer tool is developed primarily for the Winter term offering of the course COIT13152, Operating Systems. The idea sounds good and other staff ask for barometers in their courses. In the end 8 courses have course barometers in this term and 321 contributions were made.

1999 to 2002: The Ad Hoc Years

Up until June 2001 course barometers were placed on the web at the request of the course coordinator. Barometers were not compulsory. Use of the barometers was ad hoc and depended mostly on the encouragement provided by the course coordinator.

June to December 2001: Every course, no support

In June 2001 every Webfuse course had a default course site. Each default course site included a course barometer. i.e. every course had a course barometer. However, encouraging students to use the course barometers was still ad hoc.

Only 48 of the 111 courses received barometer contributions with an average of 9.7 contributions per course. Only 16 courses had greater than 10 contributions.

December 2001: The Evaluation

During December 2001 an evaluation was performed to determine the reasons why contribution to the course barometers were limited. This evaluation consisted of a student survey.

The results of the survey formed the basis of a paper

David Jones, Student feedback, anonymity, observable change and course barometers, Proceedings of EdMedia'2002, Denver, Colorado, June 2002

The conclusions of the paper and evaluation include:

• Students perceive that the barometer is not an important part of the faculty's processes so they question the point of contributing.
• There is some concern about the need to provide a student number and password before making a contribution. However, most students indicate that this isn't a major problem and some indicate it should be used.

February 2002: The Redesign

Based on the results of the evaluation plans are made to redesign the faculty's use of the barometer. These plans include

• Appointing a barometer booster.
  A faculty staff member tasked with encouraging student contributions to the barometers.
• Creating a barometer home page
  To explain the barometer concept and provide access to services to generate statistics from the barometers.
• Communicating to students the importance of the barometer.
• Ensuring that responses to student concerns are made and are visible to students

Only some of these were implemented. A survey was done in May/June 2002. The early results are reported in the presentation for the 2002 EdMedia paper. In particular a small summary and various other slides that have some statistics, including this one with an overview of the two surveys

July, 2003: Adding Responses

The ability for staff to make responses, in a form they choose, has been added.

Staff can read the documentation about the process.