Category: Module 3

With the knowledge that I am being assessed I begin to second guess myself.  Then I think of what Gibbs & Simpson said about designing assessment which was “first to support worthwhile learning, and worry about reliability later.”  Still I  have to wonder if the assessment I am designing driven by the meeting the requirements of this assignment so that I can get a decent grade or by my wanting to both push my boundaries – both technical and personal – and create a worthwhile assessment tool.

As I sat in the waiting room at the hospital on Thursday evening waiting for my nephew to get a cast for his broken wrist, I watched the Grey’s Anatomy episode, ‘Perfect Little Accident’ wherein…

Avery brought in a patient who he seemed to know. Turned out the man was his grandfather, and a legendary doctor. Cristina had come over to help and misdiagnosed Dr. Harper Avery (as in “the Harper Avery Award”). She was mortified.

Teddy and Arizona’s lung transplant patient was told that he was too high-risk to get a lung. Lexie remembered a program in which the hospital was taking lungs that would otherwise be discarded and repairing them on bypass. Cristina wanted to get on the case. She thought it would be awesome for winning awards if the procedure could be done while Harper Avery was in the hospital.

Teddy was upset and yelled at Cristina for going rogue and stealing the lungs. They argued about Cristina’s motivation (winning awards) and Cristina tried to convince Teddy that she could pull off the surgery.

Teddy and Cristina were working on the patient and the lung tissue was falling apart. Teddy was upset, saying that awards only motivate doctors to be competitive, rather than make good decisions. edited from IMDB

I couldn’t help but see parallels with some of the comments Martin Jenkins made and quoted on the first page of Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.  I have no problem with the idea that assessment is a motivator in education, but can’t help questionning what kind of education is it motivating.

As much as the courses I have designed and teach presents them with tools to analyse business, the goal is for them to apply the tools to their own experience and to compare these to their own preconceptions and previous experience in and knowledge of business practice in their own culture.  While they may learn business concepts, it is the application of these that is key.  I am not concerned about their ability to tell me about the tools or even about how they apply them.  I am interested in what goes through their minds when they think about the similarities and differences in culture and how they apply to certain aspects of business, about whether or not they think different business practices affect the success of a business, whether these practices are transferable or culture specific.  Assessing this is challenging.  I do give feedback, but it is quite often more in the form (and formative) of questions as most of this occurs during asynchronous discussion forums.  The students have 2 assignments to complete – both written.  One is a creative assignment where they must find an idea from an outside source that is unrelated to their host company that they think will financially improve their company (a coffee company selling music; a bookstore selling tea; an insurance company cross marketing gas masks) and explain why they chose it, how it can be used, and the steps it would take to bring it in and make it profitable) I give them examples and guidelines as to how they should frame their report.  I remember a student asking me once, ‘what do you want’?  I told him that it was not about what I want, but about what he thinks is good, creative, interesting, to which he responded, so what do I need to do to get a good score?’  I just smiled and told him, ‘the further outside the box you go, the better your mark will be.’

The final assignment is a summary of their company, its operations, suggestions they might have for the company and a reflection on their experience and where this experience might take them.  What I am attempting to achieve with these students is much in line Saljo’s 5^th conception of learning as stated in Gibbs & Simpson: ‘Learning as a change in personal reality: seeing the world differently.”  For most of what I ‘measure’ is the ‘difference’ from where they started in this program to where they are when they ended.  But how?  I had one student who hated everything about being here.  One of his (many) bones of contention was that he perceived the operations of his host company as being completely disorganized, primarily because he could never get the information he needed to complete his ISO project when he required it.  At the end of the program, he discovered that he needed to be more flexible and, well, that he was not the centre of the universe.  Trust me that was huge.  But, is there a tool to measure that?

Setting up the initial framework for Moodle was relatively simple as I’ve run about 10 versions of the same course through the LMS.  The biggest challenge was coming up with the number of weeks for the course I’m thinking of teaching as well as how I might be able to fit in the elements mentioned in my flight path without the thing looking like a document written by someone who had discovered the font menu.  That said, I tried adding a Wiki and a glossary.  I’ve always wanted to add a glossary and I thought a Wiki would be a great way to get the students involved.  I’m still a bit ‘up in the air’ as to how to ‘run’ the Wiki.  Its objective is to allow students to play with the definitions of both business as well industry specific vocabulary that they will need to know in English for their interviews.  I thought of allowing the students to be able to post vocabulary in their own language and get assistance from their classmates, but that would require that I can check the definitions of the words they put and I’m just not that multilingual.  The other challenge is that I have students from a variety of language backgrounds and academic fields and if I have only one student from, say, one language background, s/he is kind of hooped.  Thinking as I write, perhaps I can get them to throw vocabulary up there that they are not familiar with and ask their classmates to help them as well as define the terms I have placed in the glossaries.  Oh, and perhaps I can break the students up into groups and have them work on a glossary as a group.  Hmmm…. I’ve never used group work with my students.