My Etec 565a Portfolio

My assesment on the Moodle site I am creating is located at Marc’s Moodle Quiz

This week was a challenge for me and a set of highs and lows. It was humbling, and a bit depressing, to read Gibbs and Simpsons and the myriad of challenges facing assessment in schools. This is especially true in the subject matter that I work in because it is so subjective and hard to measure and objectify. The highlight of the week was finding out the assessment possibilities there were with Moodle. The ability to give feedback to answers, to allow for second chances in answering questions made for much better feedback mechanism than the written exam and oral feedback in class (that I would often give the following week).

Since I am new to Moodle, I have not explored all of the ways to alleviate these problems:

I would like to see the following for assessing creative work. The biggest problem with assessing creative work is the sheer number of students and the length of time it takes to give worthwhile meaningful feedback. For a typical small mini game this could be 1.5 hours per student of reviewing the game, then giving a written critique and suggestions for improvements. WIth four classes of 20 students this is an unmanageable amount of feedback. In interactive game design it is nearly impossible to be objective about ones own work (only a small minority of professionals have this ability) so good feedback is critical to their skills progressing. Here is what I would like to do (some may be possible but I have to dig into Moodle some more).

1. Blind peer feedback. I would like students to peer asses others work, having access to their digital assets (in my cases sometimes this is .exe files) and give meaningful feedback to the other student (without necessarily knowing who it is.). Since these assignments are long to review it would be nice to have random groups selected. The student would not know who is reviewing them and the reviewer would not know the student’s work they are reviewing.

2. Ability for me, as the instructor, to rate the student feedback. If peer feedback is going to work, the students need to develop their analytical and critical thinking abilities. Students seem to be quite timid about giving constructive feedback to their ‘friends’. The tricky part is, to properly assess the feedback, I might need to actually play the games, which now defeats the purpose of the above strategy.

I need to find ways to turn the students into good peer reviewers and improve their critical thinking skills.

As far as testing goes, this far surpasses the paper method I currently use. I like the ability in multiple choice to allow second attempts, and partial points when they get ‘some of the concept’ right.

The ability to micro control the scoring and feedback mechanism is fascinating and I don’t think I tapped into a fraction of its potential.

I found it odd though when calculating a mark for the essay portion. I must have set it up wrong because it would give the student a score even though the instructor has not reviewed and scored the essay yet. I know this is a problem on my end but I did not have a chance to fix this error in my mid term exam yet.