Learning about assessing online learning

Using Online Resources to Improve Instruction

I’ve posted the draft of my final project here.  This has taken so much work, partly because I wanted to get down all my thinking about this class (Using online resources to improve instruction), which I have wanted to teach for a long time.  But now I feel like I have a much better handle on the class, because I approached it from the point of view of objectives and assessments. 

The objectives I usually have to work with (from State and national sources) to use with my 12 and 13 year olds are both too detailed (too many of them) and too general (students will utilize good grammar).  Now, I get a chance to make my own objectives and tie them to the work of the course. 

Although I do this all the time in my head, I don’t always take the time to put it all down, and there is certainly value in doing this.  Not writing individual lesson plans,  but looking at the big picture.   In the past, I’ve written a narrative, but I like taking the time to tie the objectives to the assessments.  Have I overused one assessment, have I forgotten to assess how well students have met one of the objectives?

I also now have a presentation that I can use to get this course approved.  This is a course a lot of the teachers in my school would like to take, and I am excited to move to that next step. 

Weaknesses:  I am still struggling with the verbiage about the assessment being tied to the tool.  It’s so clear in my own head, I’m having trouble getting it down on paper.  (This is my own 7th graders’ greatest difficulty – getting it out of their heads and onto the paper.)   I’m also not sure that my objectives ar specific enough. 

Reading through this, I can see that using the Ning, while creative, isn’t the ideal platform.  I really need to put this on Moodle, if I can   1) find a place to host it, and 2) find somebody who will help me with the administration.   If I can’t do that, I’ll use the Ning, since it’s free and immediately available. 

This is part of the creative work that I love about teaching – figuring out what I want to teach and how I want to teach it. 

I have been working all week on the design of my class – using online resources to improve teaching and learning.  I got the objectives polished and the outline of the class done.  Then I worked on my assessment tools, which will be 1)threaded discussion (using a Ning, since it’s the easiest for organizing threaded discussions if you don’t have ready access to an LMS) and using a rubric, 2) wiki, 3) survey, 4) blog.  I still haven’t tied all the learning objectives to one of the tools, but I’m not sure I have to do that – I think it’s tie the tools to some of the learning objectives. 

I noticed in creating my objectives that I don’t have much at the low end of the Bloom taxonomy.  I have a lot of analysis, application, and evaluation, and a major piece of synthesis.

I struggled with the best way to present the project.  Of course, I could do a Word document or a PowerPoint, but those are so linear, and don’t use the hyperlinking capabilities we all seem to take for granted.  So I created a new blog to organize the materials.  I also created a Ning, since I need a place for the course itself to take place.  As I don’t have access to Moodle (yet), I decided to use a Ning, something I’ve used a lot; these are billed as social networking websites, but are so versatile you can use them for many different things.  I’m going to use it for my LMS because a Ning allows for organized and threaded discussions, as well as individual blogs for each user of the Ning.  Links can be included in posts, and materials can be uploaded, as well.  While it doesn’t have all the features I’d like in an LMS, it will do.

I also created a wiki for use by the class, with separate pages to be used by each group doing work in the class. 

I feel like I have too many learning objectives and the contents of different modules in the class probably need adjusting, but I have worked on this so much I can’t look at it for a few days.   

Creating my survey was very interesting.  I’m designing a class that I have always wanted to teach, Using Online Resources to Improve Teaching and Learning.  When I first started drafting the survey, it was full of factual stuff:  check off which of these tools you are comfortable using.   But as I got into it, I realized I’d learn much more about my students with open-ended questions (which also turned out to really be the assignment).   I ask about successful lessons and lessons teachers hate to teach, about energizing and frustrating experiences with technology, and ultimately about what the student hopes to take away from the class. 

Even though I had drafted the survey and revised it several times, once I was in Zoomerang, I found myself modifying the questions, and even completely changing them.  After I previewed the survey, I went back and changed it further.  Zoomerang limits its free survey to 10 questions, but since they’re mostly open-ended (in essence “essay questions”), I guess that’s plenty!

I think this will be a good tool for my own students at school (and they do love to give their opinions).

Learning the basics of Moodle? Here are tutorials, sample courses, documentation, experiences from real users of Moodle, and a community of Moodle users. Use the Moodle 101 search engine to find out what you want to know. Enjoy!

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Learning the basics of Moodle? Here are tutorials, sample courses, documentation, experiences from real users of Moodle, and a community of Moodle users. Use the Moodle 101 search engine to find out what you want to know. Enjoy!

Now that we finished and posted our project, I realize that I feel a closer bond with my group members.  We got something accomplished, learned from each other in the process, and had fun.  I was telling my daughter about the experience, and she said now she wants to take an online class, whereas before, she couldn’t see the point.  I said it has to be a good online class, like the one I’m taking.  :) 

I’ve decided to use this project to get myself started in planning an online class for my district’s teachers, Using Online Resouces to Improve Teaching and Learning in Your Classroom.  

I’ve thought about using a survey at the beginning to find out about student’s level of knowledge and skill, and to also find out what student goals are.  This gives me a baseline to measure against. 

I want to come up with an effective tool for students to work in small groups, so that’s something I want to research. 

I don’t know if I will have a platform like Moodle to work with, so I need to find sources for threaded discussion. 

I want students to keep track of what they find, so I want to consider if Delicious or Diigo is a better fit for them.

There are clearly a lot of tools I can use with these student/teachers.  But I don’t want to go overboard so the learning curve is too high.  This will be interesting.

I enjoyed reading Casey’s case study about her plan to teach about journalism to high school students.  I was frustrated by the fragmented form of her plan, the reliance on the same few activities, both for learning and for assessment.  Here’s some great material buried in “same old same old.” 

How about showing Absence of Malice (a movie about a journalist who publishes information about a woman’s abortion, destroying her privacy and her life, starring Paul Newman and Sally Fields). 

I wanted to crack the unit open, and add a mock trial, some drama, guest speakers.  I wanted to add something about the impact of blogging on newspapers.  Something besides kids sitting in rows, quite possibly wondering when the class will end. 

My “higher order thinking assessment” involved having students write a play or story about a journalist who is facing a conflict of ethics vs. wanting to get published.  Writing fiction uses a different part of kids’ brains, and they work so hard on a creative endeavor – noticably lacking from many essays.

Below is my Assessment Taxonomy Table for the Casey case. 

Assessment taxonomy table – Casey – Fran Lo

     Recently, we’ve been working in small groups to research and write about online assessment tools.  Our group’s work is posted here.  We wrote about quiz and test builders (and I played around with Zoomerang in my other class, so I could compare it to SurveyMonkey).  We also wrote about reflection assessment tools like blogs (which we’ve been experimenting with).  Further, we wrote about peer-to-peer collaboration tools like Breeze (similar to GoToMeeting, I think); we could have used some tools like this during this project! Finally, we wrote about course-tracking tools (like gradebooks and Excel spreadsheets).  This last was my assignment.

     We had 2 weeks to accomplish this task, and spent most of the first week just trying to coordinate.  I sent an email asking if we could chat, but with people on both coasts (and one on vacation up North) that just wasn’t practical.  We sent emails, replying to all so that everybody was included, to figure out who wanted to work on which piece.

     Then Datta put up discussion forums just for each group, and we used the forum a little, but by that time, we had the emails working well for us, and continued with that tool.  Datta, did you wait to put the forums up on purpose, to give us the experience of not quite having the best tools? ;>

     We had some back and forth about what the assignment exactly was, as some of us had different ideas – look at one of the four tools in our area of tools, or look at all four?  But we worked our way around that.  Paul stepped up to pull everything together, and Ruth is writing the introduction and conclusion.  Miraculously, it’s coming together.

     Having to coordinate long distance, working out the kinks, really takes time.  If we had been working alone, each of us could have been done in a day or two.  But the experience of working together was fun and helpful (to help us remember just how long it all is!) I realize that I read the materials my team-members wrote much more closely than I might read those of the entire class. 

     While taking an online class in the past, I was in a group with somebody who didn’t do anything until the last, last minute, which was very frustrating for the rest of us.  Apparently, she only got online on Saturday, since she never posted to the forums except on Saturday.  In another class, a team member became ill, and was unable to participate.  How do we as teachers deal with students who don’t have the commitment, or have external factors which take precedence, and the team suffers. 

     As a teacher myself, I find group work rewarding and useful, but group grades are inherently unfair, so I work very hard to avoid group grades (and my students are much happier while doing group work).  But all my online classes have used group grades.  Is that because the teacher wants to force the group to find solutions? 

     In my face-to-face classroom, there are some kids who just won’t cooperate.  Period.  They bring the group to a complete standstill.  So I remove them from the group and have them do the entire assignment alone as best they can.  Is this an option online?  How do we deal with the ornery?