Category Archives: elearn

Designing DDLR – More work on assessment

Now the focus of this project on Designing the Design & Develop Learning Resources course is on pinning down the assessments. J’s assessments for DDLR 3&4 seem strong but I just want to see whether it’s possible to streamline them slightly – largely to allow learners to knock over the analysis (and design) components quickly. (Given that they should presumably have a decent idea what their students are already like and already design resources with this in mind)

After a couple of hours of looking over this, I’m wondering whether it mightn’t have been better to try to write up my own assessment ideas first and then look at J’s for additional inspiration. It’s quite difficult to look past the solid work that has already been done. I’m still mindful of the fact that the amount of documenting and reporting seems a little high and am trying to find ways to reduce this while still ensuring that the learner addresses all of the elements of competency.

One of the bigger hurdles I face with this combined subject is that the elements of the units of competency are similar but not the same. For the analysis and design sections, they match up fairly well, with only mild changes in phrasing but the development, implementation and evaluation components start to differ more significantly. Broadly speaking, both of these units of competency appear to be targeted more at freelance education designers than practicing teachers – the emphasis on talking to the client and checking designs with the client (when the teacher would clearly be their own client) requires some potentially unnecessary busy work for the teacher wanting to be deemed competent here.

I’ve tried to address the differences between the elements of competency by clustering them with loosely matching ones from the other unit of competency in this fairly scrappy looking document. I’ve also highlighted phrases that look more like deliverable items.

document listing elements of competencyThis made it much easier to look over the existing assessment documents and resources to firstly check that all of the elements were addressed and secondly to feel confident that I am sufficiently across what is required in this subject.

Broadly speaking, the existing assessment items cover these elements of competency pretty well, I only needed to add a few extra questions to the design document template to address some aspects that it might be possible for learners to overlook.

These questions are:

  • How does the learning resource address the element or unit of competency?
  • What equipment, time and materials will you need to develop your learning resource?
  • Where will you source content for your learning resource?
  • Who can/will you contact for support in developing your resource?
  • How will you review your work as it progresses?
  • Describe the type of learning design that your learning resource uses

So as it stands, I think I’ll be largely sticking to the existing assessment plan with only a few minor changes. (Largely because my predecessor knows her stuff, which has been tremendously helpful). I am still keen to find ways to address as much of this assessment as possible in class activities – being mindful of the fact that learners may not make every class and there needs to be a certain amount of flexibility.

Overall though – and clearly the dates will need to be changed, this is what the assessments look like.

assessment documentThe next step is to update the subject guide and add my amendments to the existing documents.  I do also need to devise a marking guide for the learning resources themselves – there is something appealing in the idea of having the learners create this as one of their draft resources as the unit of competency document does stretch to define learning resources as including assessment resources too. This seems like a great opportunity to get the learners thinking more critically about what makes a good learning resource.

How to Moderate a Forum » Laurel Papworth @SilkCharm

http://laurelpapworth.com/how-to-moderate-forum/

A very practical and informative guide to effectively running and moderating an online community from someone with a lot of experience in the field.

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Kahoot! – handy online quiz activity builder supporting mobile access in class

https://create.kahoot.it/#

Kahoot is a very simple but highly interactive online tool that enables teachers to create quizzes (or survey questions) that students are able to access via mobile devices. It takes a fairly gamified approach with time limits for responses to questions, points for faster responses and leaderboards

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Mooc creators criticise courses’ lack of creativity | News | Times Higher Education

http://ht.ly/pWmjI

Stephen Downes pulls few punches as he discusses how the current iteration of the MOOC is far removed from the original ideas behind it.

This has also been a concern of mine – the much touted innovation seems like anything but. While I remain unconvinced of the strengths of the connectivist model – at the very least for my preferred learning style – the original form of the MOOC was very much about embracing a substantially different learning paradigm than we see today.

Among other things, he says “I think they are marvels of marketing and of the naivety of venture capitalists. Looking at the platforms from a technological point of view, I see virtually nothing innovative. These courses [reach] 100,000 or more people, but use video lectures and old-style threaded discussion lists. The idea of Moocs as an experiment in pedagogy and educational organisation has been completely abandoned by the new platforms, to the detriment of Moocs.”

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Technology-enhanced learning – workloads and costs | The Weblog of (a) David Jones

http://davidtjones.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/technology-enhanced-learning-workloads-and-costs/#comment-6535

A sensible overview of long overdue research into the real costs (time and money) for teachers developing and delivering eLearning. The number one issue that our teachers raise with me is that they would like to do more with eLearning but don’t get the time to do it. While this research is incomplete – in that it doesn’t come up with solid figures – the fact that people are on the same page is encouraging.

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MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement? |e-Literate

http://mfeldstein.com/mooc-discussion-forums-barriers-engagement/

I’ve often felt daunted by the volume of posts and chaotic nature of discussion forums in MOOCs – glad to see that I’m not the only one. Interesting that posters tend to be higher achievers though.

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