New theme chosen and final reflection – “the ultimate synthesis” added….and a final comment about the ease of use of WordPress and UBC Blogs. Knowing what I know now – I can never go back.
Assessment Assignment #4 can be found in my moodle course.
Sometimes the toughest part is getting started. This proved to be the toughest part for me and afterward I think, why did I wait? I’m happy to be able to write that creating quizzes using Moodle is quite user friendly and easy to use.
This assignment reminded me of the importance of good questions, feedback, and assessment for and of learning.
Creating higher order thinking questions in education has received much attention recently in Ontario. Open response questions where students answer the question and provide evidence as well as opinion are common. These are the most difficult questions to grade and have proved to be the most difficult questions to use in an online learning management system (in this case Moodle) as there is no one correct answer.
My quiz was created for teacher professional development regarding Copyright Considerations for Educators. I’m reminded of the importance of feedback. In an online environment, it is useful to provide immediate automatic feedback. We know feedback needs to be timely and draw upon strengths as well as next steps for improvement. Auto feedback in Moodle makes sense for multiple choice, matching, and true/false type questions. Teachers could indicate specific chapters or page numbers or links where students could find the correct response, rather than receiving the correct answer given to them. I struggled with creating appropriate feedback for short and longer answer. The answers I could provide seem limited and I didn’t want to limit responses. I wasn’t keen on utilizing auto grading or auto feedback. As a self- assessment or assessment of learning, it serves its purpose. What a useful tool this would be in the classroom to allow student to take practice quizzes and practice exams, receive immediate feedback to assess their own progress. Blended learning, the use of an online learning management system in the regular face to face classroom would allow for easy implementation of quiz tools such as what is available in Moodle.
Access to this tool would also be beneficial to parents who take an active role in their children’s learning by helping them to determine next steps for success.
All of these reasons help to support the use of an online learning management system or Blended Learning environment in all classrooms.
Taking a moment to reflect on the rubric creation task for evaluating a Learning Management System as part of Module 2: Spaces, Places, and Platforms for Learning. Our group’s task involved selecting a learning management system for an MBA program in China.
Our LMS evaluation rubric was created with the SECTIONS framework (Bates & Poole, 2003) in mind. We chose to base the rubric on the following criteria: Students, Ease of Use, Teaching and Learning, and Interactivity.
The group task reminds me of the importance of community and collaboration in learning experiences. It is somewhat ironic that it was one of the criteria we considered in our rubric and it leaves the most lasting impression on me, as I reflect on the assignment. The assignment was a good example of a robust thinking task and collaborative inquiry.
The human component, the collaboration – the learning between colleagues is the richest part.
