For the LMS selection and rubric assignment, I worked with Paige, Mimi, Faeyza, and Andrew and our target audience was adult Francophone students looking to complete High School and improve their ability to read and write English.
Overall, this project was an excellent exercise in learning more about LMS selection, and how to work as a team to determine necessary elements in evaluating LMS systems for specific user needs. We recognized as a team how difficult it can be to accommodate each individual user’s needs, and through that initial frustration, we learned how important discussions and collaboration are in selecting the best LMS possible. While we had originally attempted to organize our rubric by users: Students, Teachers, and Administrators, we quickly realized it is difficult to divide these users in such a separate way. We realized that there is a lot more overlap between users than we originally thought, but it was important we came to this realization during our process, as we diligently worked to ensure that our collective final rubric factored in the needs of all the potential different users, facilitating their different needs (Spiro, 2014). Ultimately we divided our rubric into three sections, High Priority, Medium Priority, and Low Priority. The High Priority chart focused on LMS elements that are essential and necessary to most LMS users. Medium and Low Priorities are more “nice to have” items that allow for greater customization, and Low Priorities, more specifically, are for future predictions. Then we further organized each rubric section into Technical, Functional, and Network (with colour coding) to allow a greater visual overview of which elements the LMS is targeting.
We primarily focused on Bates (2014) SECTIONS model for a guide for LMS rubric criteria, which worked well, and offered a well-rounded foundation for our assessment categories.
An exercise like this project, developing a rubric, may be a useful tool in real-world situations. While it is nice and easy to use pre-made rubrics, it is much more effective and reflective to create one for specific purposes. While we originally tried to outline each user’s needs separately within the rubric, we realized quickly that by doing that we were failing to competently identify overlaps in user needs – so while keeping individual user needs in mind, we developed a singular rubric to better assess overall LMS adequacy. Through this process I have achieved one of the goals in my Flight Path: to gain more knowledge on LMS selection and implementation.
We worked well as a team; we meet over Google Hangouts three times over the course of the project, and we collectively contributed to a Google Document until project completion. We collaboratively discussed the placing of elements within the 3-level rubric charts. As well, we discussed and collectively decided on visual organization, categorical choices, and written content.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Spiro, K. (2014). 5 elearning trends leading to the end of the Learning Management Systems. Retrieved from http://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-trends-leading-to-the-end-of-the-learning-management-system