Grading

As it is an experimental course and first time for us, the initial assessment scheme doesn’t work very well in all items. Thus, we agreed that every facilitator is going to give his/her opinion (a short description of what was good, what would have needed more attention and effort, etc.) for his/her students to justify the final grade. I will write these into your contract postings. Grade itself i can send with mail.

If you look at the evaluation scheme, self evaluation is big part of the grade. I hope i can find self-evaluation in the contract posts or as a separate post in your blogs.

Grading system is following:
A - 90-100% of the work is done - excellent: outstanding performance with only minor errors
B - 80-90% of the work is done - very good: above average standard, but with some minor errors
C - 70-80% of the work is done - good: generally good work with a number of notable errors
D - 60-70% of the work is done - satisfactory: fair but with significant shortcomings
E - 50-60% of the work is done - sufficient: passable performance, meeting the minimum criteria
F- less than 50% of the work is done - fail: more work is required before the credit can be awarded.

The initial grading system was the following:

* 25 % of the grade is given by facilitator for individual reading and reflecting activities in personal weblog. To get the assessment, students must reflect upon the home-reading questions and personal experience questions in the tasks pages.
* 10 % of grade is given by the peers for for students’ self-directed learning (according to the evaluation criteria developed by the student in his/her personal learning contract).
* 15 % of grade is given by the student himself/herself for his/her self-directed learning (according to the evaluation criteria developed by the student in his/her personal learning contract).
* 25 % of the grade is based on peer-assessment on group product (prototypes of e-learning courses) using the voting system to assess the course quality (view an example) and writing comments about the course prototypes. See the criteria students should use to evaluate the e-learning course prototypes.
* 25 % assessment is based on group facilitator’s assessment on group product (prototypes of e-learning courses). Criteria to evaluate the e-learning course prototypes.

So, today i look all your work and see how can i follow the grading rules

Re:Confused

I was reading Confused on Cosmin’s Blog and here is what i suggest. Right now, the group has developed the course prototype and must collect evaluation of the prototype from other course members. - group workspace: :http://guno.wikispaces.com/ - evaluationhttp://guno.wikispaces.com/Formative+Evaluation  Please see if you have contributed to the course protytype. YOu can for example see if it is sufficiently illustrated and add yor part if you feel so. See if you can open evaluation questionnaire of our group (i have had problems with it). At the same time other groups will try to collect evaluations to their protytypes. Individually your task is to give some evaluations to other groups ‘prototypes. YOu find info in the comments of this posting: http://htk.tlu.ee/elearning/blog/2008/05/12/tasks-for-week-11-12th-18th-of-may/ Go and view their prototypes and comment. Individually your task weekly is to reflect on what you learned.The course is now about to end. The grade is given by peer evaluations, facilitator evaluations..specifically you can get info about grading in moodle. 

Re:Week 11 reflection on zoho questionnaire

I was reading Week 11 reflection on damir’s blog and his praise on Zoho tool.However i have not been able to access to the questionnaire in spite of several efforts. Have you collected some evaluations?If not, maybe the other people have same problem with viewing it?If not, maybe people have not found the link and some more active marketing is needed? For example bombing all participants with emails asking to evaluate the course?

Re:Re: Formative evaluation plans: finding courses etc.

I was reading Re: Formative evaluation plans on Blogs for the red sun.. and there were some questions that i try to answer:

1. Could an evaluation be conducted as very small poll or a survey or a open comment section on our Wiki’s discusion board.

I think it might be a good idea, however i would like to see that you all worked on it a bit.

2. …and then we’re supposed to start to peer review. Peer-review what I must ask?! After going through numerous blogs, I was able to find two different group spaces that were practically empty. There’s just so much peer reviewing that can be done on empty spaces.

The peer review idea should go so that people who are ready for their “course prototype” for reviewing and who have prepared this formative evaluation as well will PRESENT it to the other people they want to get opinions of. You should choose who these people are among our course members and externally from it.

3. It can be that I’m just that daft that I’m unable to find any other groups course plans but I seriously doubt it. To avoid similar situations could you Kai be so kind and place a explicitly visible link to our Wiki so that anyone willing to review it could see it at first glance.

I am afraid that propagating your course space for formative evaluation is part of your planning the formative evaluation. It is part of the GROUP task to make the course prototype reachable. It is a tricky thing as you already understood and needs to be discussed how to get the best result. Only if you request and show me what specifically as part of your plan, it can be for example added to the course blog sidebar. You can and should post iT ALSO HERE http://htk.tlu.ee/elearning/blog/2008/05/12/tasks-for-week-11-12th-18th-of-may/
4. As addition to this, are we assigned with a group that we should evaluate or should we just try and evaluate the ones we can find?

The other groups should find you. A least this is how i imagine it will work.

Formative evaluation plans

Individually: Reflect on course readings in your blog: How to formatively evaluate e-learning course designs?1. As a group create a formative evaluation plan of your whole course.

Formative evaluations can be in essay format or you can develop a small online questionnaire using Doodle or Zoho tools.

Best is to start the development of formative evaluation instruments in your wiki.

If needed a synchronous chat may be an option this week.
2. Present course prototype with formative evaluation plan to external networks and other workgroups.

Hard part is to make your course clearly viewable for these people who start evaluating.

Present them evaluation instrument in Doodle, or in narrative format in wiki pages or blog.
3. Compose and collect peer-evaluation of the courses.

Evaluation may be done in blog or wiki. The main purpose of this evaluation during the development is to improve the course before it is ready.

Re:9. (3.-9.5.) : Reflection (Mikko)

I was reading 9. (3.-9.5.) : Reflection (Mikko) on Blogs for the red sun.. and

some of Mikko’s reflection came to my attention.  He says that sometimes the design seems to be too naive and not well argumented.

This made me think that to make courses successful, the ways of activating people need to be considered from the sides of:

- what might work

- and what might not work

For the latter case there always needs to be a strategy how to make students working if the initial idea is not working. It is part of scaffolding.

Maybe this Backup strategy should be part of the course design as well. It may consist of 1)how to detect that something is not working the easiest way 2) how to try to make it work 3) how to try something different instead.

Another concern what Mikko seems to have is pedagogical soundness of activities. I have pointed out earlier in our discussions some important things:

- teach to do something in the same environment what people need to learn (eg. dont plan activities in wiki if you teach blogging competences): augmented situational learning tasks must be relevant for these learners, then they will motivate too

- try to make interrelations between individual and collaborative spaces so that they were related by activities (eg. individual essays in blogs need to somehow be part of bigger picture - they must be needed for something as a group task, or for some bigger individual task and people should benefit from monitoring how each of them accomplishes tasks)

This relates with self-regulation and other regulation activities that must be balanced at the course, one should not block the other, but support it.

It also relates with the co-construction of knowledge principle.

Jonassen has proposed a model for designing constructivist learning environment on the web, which surround a problem with related cases, information resources that support knowledge construction, cognitive tools, conversation and collaboration tools, and social contextual support for implementation.

Try in your prototype explanations bring out what the facilitator should do. And what is the role of peer support. And how it will be done with the course tools in each activity.

course materials in delicious

I think there has been quite a good job in planning the course model.

I can see that there are no bookmarks at our shared account.

What if to make it like the task - each member of the group needs to find 5 suitable materials for certain topic?

Later you can choose which exactly fits by voting or by adding extra tags and comments to these materials in delicious.

If the topics are clear, you could add these topics as some tags or bundles to delicious and then find suitable materials?

So here is what you decided what we need to collect:

1. Guide to setting up a blog
2. Guide to using a blog
3. Guide to using RSS feeds and aggregators
4. Guide to finding other blogs with related information

As addition to the previous we need to search free articles for the following purposes:

1. Reading material for background of blogs
2. Reading material for technological background of blogs
3. Reading material for pedagogical use of blogs

Later you can use this collection in delicious as the place where your course prototype students are supposed to get materials.

Furthermore, when selecting materials, pay attention that they were helpful for these assignments:

1. What web and social software I’ve used in the past and for what purposes. Explain what you know about the background of these software solutions and what you know about their use as learning tools.
2. For what purposes blogs have been developed for and what is their background. Based on the given materials and the materials you’ve found, explain how you would use blogs as learning tools and what are their strenghts in this.
3. What are feeds and how you would use them to help your work.
4. No bloody idea yet… Fourth essay => to evaluate how well the learners have succeeded in gathering deep and profound knowledge about the subject when comparing the last essay to the first one

group bookmark account

Mikko made an account to del.icio.us for the whole group for gathering materials.

Account info: http://del.icio.us/emim03group1

Back to the contracts - with peer’s eyes

This week you have one important task: to peer review the contracts of your groupmates from the perspective of groupwork.

Each of you did something for the e-learning course design. This SOMETHING should be part of your individual contract.

Before peers can review your contracts, in the beginning of the week, pleas make an update to your contracts AS A NEW POST NEW contract. It is useful to keep initial contracts intact and not to modify them. These new contracts must be related with your tasks and evaluation as part of the group.

You can add link from new contract to old contract to keep them related.

As soon as the contracts are done, we make the PEER review of contracts. Please go and comment the contracts of your peers, the main is to see is it sufficiant what they plan as part of the group…is it effective what they plan as action strategies? Can their work be evaluated according to the criteria they have suggested?

I hope in the end of the week we can try out this peer review of RENEWED contracts.

Protected: chat 1