{"id":25,"date":"2011-05-14T15:52:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-14T23:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/"},"modified":"2011-07-30T10:39:23","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T18:39:23","slug":"course-site-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/course-site-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Course Site"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Rationale:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

My Moodle on Growing Success Grades 1-12 Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools <\/em>is complete according to my interpretation of\u00a0the requirements of the course.\u00a0 The goal of my course was to familiarize teachers with the new policy that has been in\u00a0effect this past year.\u00a0 Teachers have not had many opportunities to work with this document collaboratively.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As my audience is adult learners, I felt that I\u00a0wanted to respect their need for a self-paced, self-assessed format but still include as much group interaction as possible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

My Moodle<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

To that end, my moodle is:\u00a0 http:\/\/moodle.met.ubc.ca\/course\/view.php?id=290<\/a><\/p>\n

My selection of components is as follows:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 -a Splash Page as the Home Page of the course – each image and phrase links to the corresponding module\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0-4 completed sections:\u00a0 a Staff Room for meeting, a Course Introduction and Rationale (Module 1), a Learning Skills and Work Habits Module ( #3), and a Final Quiz.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In these completed Modules, I have included discussion forums\u00a0– 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Then it can become visible to all participants.<\/p>\n

I created\u00a0six web pages in Weebly and have inserted them into Module 1 and 3.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0 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\u00a0selective release so I went with that. Hopefully I was on one of the right tracks!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Using the feedback from the quiz assignment, I added 2 more matching questions to the final quiz.\u00a0\u00a0Oops on that one!<\/p>\n

How I Feel About the Whole Process:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Some of the help was contradictory, and finding the solution (there are many!) to the programmed release issue was a real challenge.\u00a0 I hope I met the requirement sufficiently.\u00a0 This was a great challenge for me, as I have heard about Moodle, but have not had any experience with it at all.\u00a0 So after many hours of “tinkering” with a furrowed brow, I have become quite a bit more comfortable with the platform.<\/p>\n

The content of the Moodle provided an challenge equal to that of the technical requirements.\u00a0 It was\u00a0a difficult to ensure that the independent learner can access the content as needed, when needed, and that there\u00a0would be\u00a0many opportunities to access support from colleagues and the instructor.\u00a0 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\u00a0high.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Hopefully, the discussisons would be as rich as ours in 565 66C!<\/p>\n

This activity was an excellent example of the power of constructivism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The result in my opinion, was greater learning.\u00a0 Hunting for the answers is the best way to remember the learning as I have experienced first hand.\u00a0 Thanks John!<\/p>\n

I must say, I am actually going to miss this activity – I would never have guessed that at the beginning of my Moodling!\u00a0 The possiblities of activities and resources, and how each of them can be configured specifically to suit your needs is amazing.\u00a0 Knowing that 2.0 has even more possibilities is a bit daunting!\u00a0 I noted in other Moodle samples, that the options for appearance are\u00a0endless and I wouldn’t even recognize some of them as Moodle sites.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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).<\/a> San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Rationale: My Moodle on Growing Success Grades 1-12 Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools is complete according to my interpretation of\u00a0the requirements of the course.\u00a0 The goal of my course was to familiarize teachers with the new policy that has been in\u00a0effect this past year.\u00a0 Teachers have not had many opportunities to work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2101,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-25","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/courey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}