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 Robert Therrien, No Title (Blue Plastic Plates), 1999 I’ve made many small changes in my classes, and am pleased with the result. (It’s especially pleasing because so many times I make big changes to little effect!) 1. Lotsa Quizzes: I got rid of the textbooks for most of my classes and wrote factual quizzes based on my lectures, giving the quizzes weekly instead of every two weeks. There are more questions but fewer points per question, and they get hints for each question because they can change their answer (I actually didn’t intend this, but I kind of like it). This format helps them keep up and review during each quiz. 2. Separate Multiple Choice and Essays: I’ve separated the multiple choice lecture/factual questions from the essay questions. The quizzes used to be a small number of factual questions plus one essay, given every two weeks. Students would have to wait to get the results until I graded the essay. Now they get the quiz results immediately. 3. Three Essay Exams: Instead of having a short essay due every two weeks as part of the quiz, I’ve instead created two major essay exams plus the final exam. They seem to be spending more time and effort on these and the quality is much better. And I grade less often but it’s more in-depth so I hope my comments are more helpful. 4. Grading Criteria Inside the Exam: Instead of just relying on a Grading Information page, I’ve included the criteria for essay grading as part of the essay question itself. That seems to be helping the essays also. 5. Seminar Hybrids: For my San Elijo hybrid classes, I’m using a seminar format. Some would call what I’m doing “flipping” the classroom, because all lecture reading, forum postings, public writing, quizzes and essay exams are online. We meet an hour and a quarter a week, and spend most of the time talking together about primary sources and how they fit into the era. It’s so wonderful to work in this seminar setting — I learn as much as they do. I will miss it very much. (It’s unlikely I will be able to do it again because hybrids are new and thus enrollments were low.) 6. Encouraging Late Source Posts: Each forum is one weekly topic, so I normally encourage moving on. But students will need the sources they post later for the essay exams. So now I encourage those who want more sources for their essay to go back and post them. This way everyone can use them, and the source collection is bigger. 7. Grading Late Quizzes By Date: I close each quiz with a password after the due date, but students may take them up to a week late for reduced credit. I’ve always reduced the score the same amount for a late quiz. But now when they email me for the password, I tell them I’ll take off less if they turn it in as soon as possible, and email me the minute they’re done (so I can change the score manually). This encourages them to finish up the quiz so they can move on to the next week’s material. These changes were labor intensive to set up, but actually save me time and effort during the semester, so I have more energy to actually talk with students and tend to their learning as we go along. Far more of my time is spent encouraging and teaching rather than grading, and this is true of both my hybrid and online classes. It’s shaping up to be a good semester. My hybrid classes are such a delight to me, but enrollment is low and gets lower as students discover they are real classes and they’ve overloaded their schedule. Trouble is, that means that fewer sources get posted in the forum each week. Since the writing in the class is all about creating and proving theses using the evidence posted by the whole class, when fewer people participate, there aren’t as many sources to use as evidence. Right now I have several sections of the same class in Moodle, but I set the forums as Separate Groups. These are separate sections of the class, each with their own dynamic and needs. For two classes, one of each of the sections is the hybrid I see at San Elijo each week. A student stayed after class today, worried that there wouldn’t be enough sources since not everyone is posting. Going back to my office to solve the problem, I was hoping there was an easy way to have my hybrid sections see what the online sections were posting, so they could use their sources also in their writing. In fact, now that no one is lost, and everyone knows where to post their work, there’s no reason why all sections of the same class can’t see each others’ sources and use them. This proved to be a really easy fix. I simply changed each forum from Separate Groups to Visible Groups. But I needed a way to let everyone know what was going on, so I used Screenr.
Total fix time? Less than an hour, including the screencasts. This week I have been attending to the various discussions around the recent work of Jon Dron and Terry Anderson, including the Hot Seat forum related to the 8th International Conference on Networked Learning (no, I’m not going to Maastricht) and Jon’s presentation at the Change MOOC (the web space for this is here). Sources also include Dron and Anderson’s 2009 article Lost in Information Space: Information retrieval issues in Web 1.5. I am intrigued and delighted with an approach I see as middle ground between the Web 1.0/closed classes/LMS/hard tech/group focus and the Web 2.0/open education/network/connectivism focus. For the former, the model seems to be formal groups of people, such as a class, using closed but comfortable ways to learn online in a manner prescribed by an instructor, with the result being a grade. For the latter, we have the open ideas of networks, learning taking place in weak and strong connections, with softer technologies that provide for more creative work. Looser forms of assessment (such as badges and feedback) follow this model as well. In the middle of this dichotomy is what Dron and Anderson call Web 1.5, and what they refer to as “sets”, unintentional collectives of people who learn within a shared interest. Thus there is a middle ground between the horribly limited, walled garden system and the wild, diffuse, scary openness of networks. These discussions are especially timely in light of my own efforts to find such a balance between closed/open, safe/scary, hard/soft in designing my online classes for next semester, where the unscary stuff (my own work, such as lectures, information, readings) is completely open, but the scary stuff (anything graded, such as student forums, quizzes, and essays) is closed in the Moodle LMS. It is not, as I’ve noted, an ideal balance or compromise, because unlike the Elgg VLE used by these authors, I do not have granularity of permissions where students may choose exactly what elements of their work are open or closed. I had thought that creating a broader “group” in Facebook (of all my students, not just those enrolled in one class) would design some openness for them, but of course I have been reminded that Facebook is closed too. It’s just an LMS with advertising, and a flat social space. On the other hand, at least there isn’t any hierarchy, and perhaps there is comfort there within a more open way of communicating, if not a more open role. As much as I love the far out, wild west, final frontier elements of open web-based learning for my own use, I do not think my students are ready to the extent that I could handle helping 240 of them manage it. At the same time, the limitations of LMS-based education drive me crazy. So it’s productive to envision Web 1.5 pedagogies that could, in Jon’s Goldilocks analogy, get to a point of “just right”.
 Comments are closed  MOOCs, Moodle, Musings, Open Education, Pedagogy, Students, The Web, Theory, Web 2.0  potcert11 change11 #change11 aka Mass Management of 240 Students While Keeping My Stuff Open As I discussed in my last post, I have suffered much guilt lately for feeling inadequate to the task of teaching next semester’s 240 students using a connectivist methodology. I am essentially designing a semester, not six classes, because the design has to work for me as well as my students. My solution for part open/part closed has come to this:
Here’s the new design:
Tabbed web pages as the “front door” of the class OK, so I figured out how to do tabs for my webpage so it’s easy to navigate. One tab is the Syllabus. I already have an intro page for each class (here’s the one for History 104). I have used the Escape from Blackboard technique to post the intro pages there too for students who think Blackboard is their online class portal. When I’m done designing the tabbed pages, I’ll replace those intro pages with the actual class webpages. Interactive syllabus Using the principles of an interactive syllabus, everything is linked from that page. The idea of an interactive syllabus is that the syllabus should look very familiar to students from their on-site classes. It becomes the main page of the class, because their tendency is to go there first. Other static pages are the other tabs. I can use iframes to put anything (for example, my FAQ, which is common to all my classes) I want on a tabbed page. Moodle for everything that’s graded The tricky part is the links into Moodle, my LMS. I want Moodle to handle the grunt work of tracking students and doing the grades. That means students will need to log in to Moodle for anything that counts as part of the grade or that requires Moodle to do what I want pedagogically. For example, I want students to post primary sources and theses, and rate each others’ posts. Now, when I create a Moodle class that has all these elements (Quiz 1, Quiz 2, Quiz 3, Forum 1, Forum 2, etc. for 17 weeks) I don’t want students to see them all listed at the Moodle site. They’ll get confused and think the class is there instead of at the web page. So what I’m doing is putting them all under Topic 2 in the Topics format in settings, then changing the settings to only one topic. This way, the only thing they see at the Moodle class is direction back to the web page, but all the exams and forums can be linked by URL from the interactive syllabus into Moodle, which makes them log in for tracking. This trick is to put active items in an area, and then “hide” that area by making fewer areas in Settings. Here’s how I am doing it: In the interest of my own efficiency, there is only one Moodle site per course, with groups to designate the different class sections. So for History 111, where I have one hybrid and two online, it’s the same web page and the same Moodle site but using three groups to keep the gradebooks separate. No more changing things at several different Moodle sites when something needs changing. Facebook group I have changed the name of my old History 104 San Elijo FB group to Lisa’s History Classes. They can join the group without friending anyone. Theoretical justification for this design All my content should be open – my lectures are freely available on the web, and so are my class policies and design. Students should only have to log in when they need to do something that counts toward the course grade. 240 students requires class management of grading and work — Moodle is convenient but I could also use Engrade for the grading. Discussion forums are harder. I am making a conscious choice in favor of Moodle here because of the simple, nested forums. They fit my pedagogy. Constructivism is built into the course design — in the forums students choose their own primary sources from the web, post them, and decide which to use in support of their writing. Theoretical problems The constructivist element is not the “front door” of the class — you need to go down the hall to get to it. This argues in favor of putting everything into the discussion forum, but then the content I created isn’t as open and students have to log in to get to anything. The constructivist activity isn’t public — to do this, I could use WordPress as the platform instead of the web pages and Moodle forums. However, I do not believe I can effectively manage 240 students without a separate blog for each of the six classes. Monitoring users and pseudonyms will be difficult, not to mention monitoring activity. I have tried BuddyPress and other CMS-style plugins but can’t get them to work easily on this scale. And yes, I could change my mind about all this next week, but for now this is my design for spring. We’ve had some assignments at Pedagogy First! lately where we asked people to embed stuff, but didn’t tell them how! 8-0 Sooo….Here is a YouTube video on embedding a Slideshare slidecast into Blackboard, Moodle and WordPress: Here is another, on embedding a Jing video from Screencast.com into Blackboard, Moodle and WordPress: And here is one on embedding a YouTube video (like these) into a WordPress post: 2 comments - (Comments are closed) Blackboard, CMS/LMS, How To, Moodle, Program for Online Teaching, Web 2.0 potcert11 |
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All of my own presentation material will be on the open web via…a web page. Yes, I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I have found a number of old habits becoming new again. This includes saving everything I post online as plain text documents (including this post), keeping web pages and folders for most things that I do, and backing up the multimedia I make to my own hard drive.
Oh, well, it still prevents confusion upon entering the Moodle site.
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