Alix’s Exploration of Learning Technologies

I have worked collaboratively before on a wiki for a course assignment. In the previous case however, I was working with only two other people and we each prepared our own separate pages. As such, no one did any major changes on the others’ pages. This experience working on a wiki was different. The contributing group was much larger and we were all editing a single page. The advantage of this is each student contributed a small section, but we ended up with a large artifact documenting social media “sightings” and key challenges and strategies for implementing social media into education. Another advantage is that we were able to edit mistakes that the original contributor may have missed. Collaborating to produce a single artifact with many contributors and editors is not without it’s challenges though. A wiki is often edited by contributors separated by space and time leading to a number of issues. For example, there is an issue of consistency and voice in an artifact. When collaborating in this manner, the contributors need a way to communicate and make democratic decisions. In the wiki activity where we contribute 5 challenges and strategies, one student came up with the idea of puuting an “x” next to the submissions we would like to contribute to the “top 5” . The submissions with the most “x”s would become the final 5.  Another issue is that whole contributions can be deleting or greatly modified by other users leading to feelings of frustration by the original author.

In my LMS, I have included a variety of opportunities for both formative and summative assessment. Moreover, I have included opportunities for peer, self, and teacher feedback.  Under Topic 2: Cell structures, formative assessment is afforded by a discussion forum enabling peer feedback  and a quiz tool enabling self assessment. In the discussion forum, the students must develop a cell analogy (eg. the cell as a city or a school) and read and critique the analogies of other students. By participating in this forum, students must translate their knowledge into an analogy and then defend the analogy based in peer feedback, thus engaging in the social negotiation of learning. Self assessment is afforded by the completion of a study guide and a quiz. The study guide requires the students to summarize information from a note package. The questions are designed to focus the students attentions on key concepts and the desired learning outcomes. The self-assessment quiz provides pre-programmed general feedback that reminds students where they should be focusing their study efforts. The overall feedback from the quiz provides suggestions for further action based on the quiz results. Formative assessment  and teacher feedback is provided by a concept map assignment that must be submitted online and an in class exam. The time spent creating the concept map also serves as review of the material in preparation for the exam.

The development of the assessment tools in moodle was, as usual relatively intuitive. Setting up the discussion forum, uploading the study guide and adding the concept map assignment did not take long. The discussion forum options give the administrator the option to grade participation either by number of posts or by allowing peers to rate postings. The assignment tool allows the administrator to control the submission time line  and there is an option to receive an e-mail when the assignment is uploaded.

The quiz tool was much more time consuming. Each question has to be created and saved separately. Each response can be given specific feedback and each question general feedback. Overall feedback at the end of the quiz can give feedback specific to the quiz results. Feedback and grading is not available for essay questions and thus must be graded manually. There are options to control: the number of times students may attempt the test, the time between attempts, and which grade will be counted (if at all).

After completing this assignment, I would think twice before developing an online test using moodle as creating a question bank along with the pre-programmed feedback is very time consuming. However, once a question bank is established, the quiz tool could serve as a powerful assessment tool providing valuable feedback to the students with little effort from the teacher.