Boldic Award for our Scandinavian online program in multimediajournalism

The Boldic Award 2011 was anounced Friday, October 21th in Stockholm, and it was awarded the Scandinavian project Multimedia journalistikk by NKI Nettstudier, Berghs School of Communication and the Danish School of Media and Journalism.

Kristiina Müllersdorf (Berghs) and
Morten Flate Paulsen (NKI Nettstudier)
at the Boldic Award Ceremony

Penn State Alumni Feature

In March, I was interviewed by the Penn State Education Alumni Magazine. I did more or less forget about it, so I was surprised when I found the printed version in my mailbox today. Anyway, my original answers to the interview questions back in March are presented below the online version of the Magazine:

Elephant carpaccio for SCRUM Masters

Sergey Dmitriev

This week I attended a two day SCRUM Master course to learn more about the methodology we use in the development of SESAM - the learning management system (LMS) at NKI Nettstudier. The course was lead by Sergey Dmitriev (picture below), an inspiring and knowledgable coach, moderator and teacher from www.agile42.no.

Here are some of my reflections after the course:

Launching NKI's new Quality Barometers

Why I'm excited?

Because we are soon launching our new Quality Barometers for online teachers and courses - which I have spent much time and energy to design, specify and implement.

So, what are quality barometers?

Well, I perceive it as tools that continuously monitor and report quality in transparent ways. I strongly believe that transparent quality barometers are efficient and cost effective quality improvement tools.

Quality barometers are especially useful in online education environments with individual or flexible start-up and progression plans. Continuous monitoring is probably hard to implement in semester based educational environments.

NKI has several years of experience with a response barometer that monitors how much time it takes from a student submits an assignment to the teacher provides feedback and a grade. Since all students have individual progress plans and can submit their assignments 365 days a year, the response barometer continuously provides transparent information about our teachers' individual and collective response time.  During the last three months (summer vacation time included), our 140 online teachers have a collective response time of two days. I'm proud to tell that their average collective response time throughout 2010 was 1.8 days.

How could such barometers measure quality?


Thermometers measure temperatures in degrees, and ordinary barometers measure pressure in pascal or bar. I suggest that quality barometers could measure in quality in VESS (meaning VEry Satisfied or Satisfied). The idea comes from the fact that NKI uses a 5-point Likert-scale as shown in the figure. The five alternatives are Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied and Very Dissatisfied. With these five alternatives, we calculate the percentage of Very satisfied and Satisfied out of the total evaluations. If the evaluations are equally distributed among all five alternatives, the calculated quality would be 40%. A lower VESS reading indicates that you may have quality challenges.

How do NKI's new quality barometers for teachers work?

You have to have some patience, since I need a few more days to finish the English version of the nano-course  I'm developing to explain how it works.













I'll be back - in a few days.