A Reflection on the fundamentals of assessment and of creating a quiz in Moodle
INTRODUCTION:
Assessment is a critical component of education; however it is sometimes easy to forget how important assessment is in our students’ success and how important it is to be as transparent as possible about assessments with students. In this course, ETEC 565, there are three key readings that discuss assessment; in the context of online learning (Anderson, 2008), in the context of students’ learning (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005) and in the context of good practice in undergraduate education (Chickering and Gamson, 1987).
In my opinion, my new found experience with LMS and Moodle provides for me a unique environment for teaching and learning. The most compelling feature of this context is the capacity for shifting the time and place of the educational interaction. Next comes the ability to support content in many formats, including multimedia, video, and text, which gives access to learning content that exploits all media attributes. Third, the capacity of the Net to access huge repositories of content on every conceivable subject—including content created by the teacher and fellow students—creates learning and study resources previously available only in the largest research libraries, but now accessible in every home and workplace. Finally, the capacity to support human and machine interaction in a variety of formats (text, speech, video, etc.) in both asynchronous and synchronous modalities creating a communications-rich learning context.
BACKGROUND:
My Moodle course is designed to support both asynchronous and synchronous modalities in my grade nine, Canadian Studies classroom. It will employ Web 2.0 activities in addition to using all of what Moodle can dish out. From peer peer assessed Glogster posters to interactive Wikis with embeded YouTube videos to realtime video conferences, blogs, and discussion forums, I will attempt to utilize every method within Moodle’s means. With that in mind, I will also employ all the technology we have currently at our school through which I will be using a SMART Board to project interactive activities so all students to see and interact with. My school also has a mobile computer lab, which we have access to for one hour every six school days. During our time with the mobile lab, I will have students work through the activities I have set up in my Moodle course in addition to taking chapter quizzes, which will be a culminating activity. A class setup of iPads will also be used with my Moodle course as it currently supports mobile devices. At the moment, I will attempt to have students complete this first quiz on their own, using iPads, in a classroom setting. This particular quiz will be considered more of a formative assessment activity and will not be used for summative assessment of my students, rather it will be used to consolidate our learning and to wrap up the current unit. All of these activities will undoubtedly change my current role as a teacher and will ultimately enhance student learning. Anderson furthers my point by stating that “Regardless of the formal role of the teacher, online learning creates an opportunity for flexibility and revision of content in situ that was not provided by older forms of medi- ated teaching and learning” (p. 346).
PERSONAL REFLECTION
With that in mind, my first quiz could also be used for summative assessment. I followed the expectations outlined in Module 3, Unit 3, and as such created a quiz with 3 multiple choice questions, 3 matching questions, 2 short answer questions and 2 short essay questions. I was able to set up the auto assess/grading feature and timing for the whole quiz. I set the timing at 45 minutes, which should be enough time. However, I imagined myself with 25 grade 9’s each with an iPad, trying to focus on working through the quiz while at the same time I know they are wanting to play a game of Angry Birds! I hope I can keep them focused for 45 mins.
I was able to provide pre-program post-exam feedback for students and most of my questions and general feedback have embedded images or videos. This is very important for this age group as video and audio might keep their focus and help their thought process when answering a question. Overall, I found creating the quiz to be relatively simple and intuitive. It did take a fair bit of time to create (approximately 3 hours), however, I feel that this process would become faster with experience.
The choice of types of questions is fantastic, as the teacher is able to choose questions that will provide constructive feedback. This is important to support student learning as Gibbs and Simpson (2005) state as Condition 5: “The feedback focuses on students’ performance, on their learning and on actions under the students’ control, rather than on the students themselves and on their characteristics” (p.18). With this in mind, I was able to set up general feedback for each question and then overall feedback based on their final mark. In addition, to emulate a true test, I have also set up the quiz so that students may only attempt it one time just to get a good indication of how much information they actually attained. I also setup the test/exam with passwords just to again follow a real test scenario and to see if students can follow my directions. Because the test will be taken in a small room with students sitting close to one another, I was also impressed with the ability to edit the question behaviour by shuffling within questions. I”ll be interested to see who will try and copy and wonder why they got their answers wrong!
Be that as it may, one limitation I found of the quiz function in Moodle is that some short answer and essay questions cannot be automatically graded. In order to protect my students from misunderstanding their result, I would be sure to show and explain to them how their work is graded in order to “develop understanding through explanations”. (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005) If I were to develop a quiz again, I would probably limit the questions to the types that can be automatically assessed and provide other activities to assess other aspects of learning.
In addition, I have also come the realization and believe there to be a accessibility challenges of certain on-line assessments. For students who are not strong readers, or do not have strong computer skills, an on-line assessment might prove to be difficult. I question if this assessment method is right for all students. For some, an on-line assessment may not be the medium for them to demonstrate their learning. In my situation, I would have some students complete the assessment on their own, others in small groups with support, and still others with a different form of assessment all together. I have a thought to try out embedding audio files into my quiz so that anyone with reading problems can listen to the question instead. At my disposal will be an iMac computer with GarageBand software so I can record myself reading out the question and therefore embed them into my quiz. We will see how this works.
CONCLUSION:
In my flight path, I identified several goals that I would like to achieve in this course. I have come a long way in achieving some of these goals in completing this assessment assignment: critical experience in the design and development of Learning Management Systems, social software, and multimedia so I may have the ability to supplement my teaching curriculum with rich interactive software, online blogging expertise, and knowledge of how to design and develop a complete Moodle course site. I indicated that I have a lot to learn about assessment and this assignment has given me the foundation through the three key readings mentioned above and hands-on practice through creating an assessment in Moodle. Going from theory to practice however is not always easy.
Prior to taking this course, I had tinkered with adding some of the “resources” in a Moodle website but I had not added any “activities”. As part of this course I have setup the following activities: chat, forum, quiz, survey and Wiki. Setting up the quiz was by far the most challenging. On-line videos from Teacher Training and 2-minute Moodles were very helpful, although not all are for Moodle 2.0. As the term progresses and my knowledge increases I anticipate students benefitting from using an LMS and online assessments. I anticipate setting up and facilitating a Moodle LMS for our school in the new year with the hopes of bringing alternative learning methods to our school and community of learners.
Below is a link to my Moodle site:
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/course/view.php?id=410
Moodle Guest Access Password:
zUtX+7aB
Moodle Exam Access Password:
winter2005
REFERENCES:
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University. Accessed online 3 March 2009 http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
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. Accessed online 11 Mar 2009 http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Accessed online 11 March 2009. http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
E-portfolio Assignment #4: Assessment tools
A complete exam or quiz for your LMS course site, reflecting a variety of question types and assessment strategies, with
10 (or more) questions. You will be assessed based on creating:
3 (or more) multiple choice questions
3 (or more) matching questions
2 (or more) short answer questions
2 (or more) short essay questions
One question with an embedded image or graphic
Partially or wholly auto-assessed/graded
Time limited
Pre-programmed post-exam feedback for students
A reflection upon your experience completing this assignment posted in the Assessment page of your e-portfolio