May 14 2011
Course Site
My Rationale:
My Moodle on Growing Success Grades 1-12 Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools is complete according to my interpretation of the requirements of the course. The goal of my course was to familiarize teachers with the new policy that has been in effect this past year. Teachers have not had many opportunities to work with this document collaboratively. In this course, they will look closely at each key section of the policy, but just as importantly, they will create resources that can be shared and accessed to make their role as assessors a bit easier and more efficient. As my audience is adult learners, I felt that I wanted to respect their need for a self-paced, self-assessed format but still include as much group interaction as possible. I have found that once groups of teachers “bond” together initially in their work, they will collaboratively work out a time-frame for completing the course together that works for everyone. Even though the new policy is a Grade 1-12 alignment, the assessment and evaluation will still look different across the grade levels – the principles are the same for all students, but what it looks and sounds like may differ. So the need to separate the 2 panels was important for the group work in the wiki assignment, but I felt it was important that the doors remained open for each group to view the work of the other – to see the commonalities between them and also the differences.
My Moodle
To that end, my moodle is: http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=290
My selection of components is as follows:
-a Splash Page as the Home Page of the course – each image and phrase links to the corresponding module
-4 completed sections: a Staff Room for meeting, a Course Introduction and Rationale (Module 1), a Learning Skills and Work Habits Module ( #3), and a Final Quiz. I chose to leave 3 Modules and the Glossary as shells for now, but as I am exporting the files to my computer, I have the option to complete them in the future.
In these completed Modules, I have included discussion forums – Getting to Know You, Course Questions, What’s New and the Essay Question forum in the Final Quiz. I have included Chat Rooms – dividing the participants into 2 groups – elementary teachers and secondary teachers. The 2 wikis created are also separated into the same 2 groups, but I am making them visible to each other so that they can see commonalities between the 2 panels.
In the Home Page, I created an Announcements forum that is not visible to the participants until the instructor has something to announce to the group. Then it can become visible to all participants.
I created six web pages in Weebly and have inserted them into Module 1 and 3.
My programmed selective release is found in Module 3 as a Self-Assessment Lesson – it is actually a question page created in the lesson activity format and the participant must complete the quiz, and attain a 75% mark before the last Module- (which contains one item – the Final Quiz) can be accessed. I spent hours researching how to accomplish this part of the assignment, and there are endless interpretations of how it can be done. I almost gave up and “hid” some of my assignments to call that selective release. However, stubborn as I am, (part Belgian, part French) I kept going back to the problem until I found an excellent video series that provided great detail on using the lesson activity for selective release so I went with that. Hopefully I was on one of the right tracks!
Using the feedback from the quiz assignment, I added 2 more matching questions to the final quiz. Oops on that one!
How I Feel About the Whole Process:
Overall, I overcame most of the frustrations faced with this assignment thanks to the support from my colleagues and the tremendous amount of assistance available in videos, and blog forums. Some of the help was contradictory, and finding the solution (there are many!) to the programmed release issue was a real challenge. I hope I met the requirement sufficiently. This was a great challenge for me, as I have heard about Moodle, but have not had any experience with it at all. So after many hours of “tinkering” with a furrowed brow, I have become quite a bit more comfortable with the platform.
The content of the Moodle provided an challenge equal to that of the technical requirements. It was a difficult to ensure that the independent learner can access the content as needed, when needed, and that there would be many opportunities to access support from colleagues and the instructor. Considering the volume of resources that are available to import into an online course, it was important to ensure that the quality and appropriateness of these resources was high. In a classroom, a teacher can easily modify instruction and resources at a moment’s notice, using body language, oral questionning, or quick diagnostic assessments to determine if something needs changing quickly- an online format is not nearly as adaptive. So there needs to be many forums and chat rooms available for a continuous discussion loop that can indicate if there are issues with the course materials or assignments. Hopefully, the discussisons would be as rich as ours in 565 66C!
This activity was an excellent example of the power of constructivism. It would have been easy for the instructor to step in with each anguished question posted – but instead, with gentle re-direction, John headed us towards each other and the global support community for the answers. The result in my opinion, was greater learning. Hunting for the answers is the best way to remember the learning as I have experienced first hand. Thanks John!
I must say, I am actually going to miss this activity – I would never have guessed that at the beginning of my Moodling! The possiblities of activities and resources, and how each of them can be configured specifically to suit your needs is amazing. Knowing that 2.0 has even more possibilities is a bit daunting! I noted in other Moodle samples, that the options for appearance are endless and I wouldn’t even recognize some of them as Moodle sites. I did not encounter any of the accessibility or speed issues that others lamented in their posts – for some reason, my Moodle loaded quickly and reliably. My web design skills were not challenged in any great way by using Weebly – I must admit that Dreamweaver was going to need more technical skills than I was willing to renew, so I defaulted to the much-easier Weebly site.
If I were to rate this platform according to the principles of Chickering and Gamson (1987), or the SECTIONS model of Bates and Poole (2003), I would have to say that it is a very effective tool to use for online learning.
Chickering, A.W. & Gamson, Z.F. (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), 3-7
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.