Week 8 Relfections

The final week of the course has ended. If you haven't had the experience of online interaction, you might not believe it when I say I will miss the other students in the course. I do look forward to logging in to the discussion board to see what others thought about the readings, projects created, feedback on my thoughts and projects. The varied backgrounds of the other students provides multiple viewpoints.

This week we finalized our final projects and read a couple of articles on using discussion boards. One article titled, Benefits of An Online Discussion List in A Traditional Distance Education Course, by Bradshaw and Hinton (2004) made a couple of points that interested me. One is the idea of exposure versus transformation in learning situations. A second is "if the course content is meaningful within the student's particular social context and their cultural and value system, learning is more likely to occur."

Many years ago I taught grammar and punctuation to middle school students and adult learners. Students are exposed to grammar and punctuation starting in first grade, though for many the concepts never seem to click and stick - no transformation occurs. In my mind, the secret lays somewhere in the second concept listed above. There lacks meaning in their social context, culture, and/or value system. The issue is not exclusive to English. When I figure out how to redesign learning systems to address this, I'm sure you'll hear about it.

My classmates have developed interesting projects for this course. I hope they continue to update their blogs as they implement them. I would like to see their results.

Week 7 Reflections

Developing the draft of our final project this week was a perfect example of an assessment that can be used in an online course that fosters high-level critical thinking skills and creativity. It would be nearly impossible for a student to find anything that could be plagiarized.

I asked a question on the course discussion board about utilizing information from the midterm assessments completed by our classmates. This was not done to be a smarty-pants; I could see a reasonable argument for either side. The "do your own work" side keeps participants from selecting assessments already completed to save themselves some work - even if they may not be the most appropriate assessments for their course. Also, by doing your own research on the selected assessment tools, you may find some information or features that were not uncovered in the work done by your classmate.

The argument for the "collaborative" side is that sharing work already completed reduces the duplication of effort. Teachers are notorious for working in solitude and often spend hours redeveloping work that has already been done by others. Starting with work that has already been completed frees time for adapting for the new learning experience and expanding on the work that has already been started. As long as permission is asked and credit is given, using and expanding on the work of others is a reasonable, and even desirable, task.

It will be interesting to see the many approaches to this final project by my classmates. I'm sure each will have a component or strategy that will spark an idea for me.

Final Project Draft

The final project for Assessment in E-Learning is an in-depth analysis of how four assessment tools will be implemented in our online course. My final project draft is posted on my Google electronic porfolio as "Andrea's Final Project." All questions, comments, and revision suggestions are welcome.