digichat

This was my first experience designing assessment for online course. It was truly a learning experience for me, learning which involves frustration, anxiety, discovery and the list continues.My attempt to write the course made me realize that moodle contains a feature that allows students the possibility of more than one attempt with the possibility of using the highest scores good for test takers. My concern will this help the student to master the content or will it just serve as a means to an end where test takers can memorize the contents of the test then return wit the correct answer to improve their grades.
Another aspect of the assessment was shuffling the questions; I did not like that idea of shuffling objective and subject items. In my opinion it will be distracting for the test taker. I must say I like the initiative of immediate feedback which is very import to learning as pointed out by Gibbs and Simpson (2004-05). However, I found the many fields of feedback that is required in the assessment to be tedious. To say the least it was very difficult figuring out how Moodle works and how to fix the test when it did not work according to how I think it should. Boy did I sweat.

In my planning to set up the course in Moodle I choose a course I thought was exciting and would lend it self to highlight the discussion board, and other aspects of moodle. That was a good idea until it was time to set up the assessment, I could not figure out how to set up a portfolio since the course is assessed using authentic assessment and two the requirement was for us set include objective and subjective items.

Let me quickly point out some things about moodle that I like, it allows the flexibility and control to the developer/instructor in terms of methodology, feedback and ongoing assessment. The instructor has the flexibility of choosing when and where in the course to use all sorts of interesting and challenging technology to capture students and get them actively engaged in the learning process. Through the use of discussion boards, chat, wikis, and a myriad of other communication tools the instructor can give feedback and engage in formative assessment.

I choose to use a course from my college syllabus so I can get practice to help me in the future to set up on line courses. Despite the challenges I am not swayed I will be involve in online courses may be I will start by integrating online course as part of a blended approach until I am comfortable going the full hundred yards.

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 11 March 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf.