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

Notes on web 2.0 collaborative work

Today i was looking what the group has done so far.

One thing what i see is that in general we are well in line with other groups.

Secondly, this group has been very self-directed - that is good, it is one of the aim of the course to let people experience self-directed work.

Third thing is my assumption of the rivalry of collaborative and individual spaces seems to be true.

People tend to neglect individual reflections when they are involved in collaborative activities.

Fourth thing is that until the group is satisfied with the affordances of the collaborative space, it keeps shifting and changing dynamically. I think it is very notable that the group has decided to neglect the first collaborative space for the sake of finding one that seems more compatible with their activities.

We will see is it so, and what faults we will discover in wiki. For me, for example the feed does not work as i would have liked if i pull it to my blog.

All in all, it seems what we learn from this course is how learners feel and act in such spaces if they are involved in distributed workspaces in self-directed settings to do something collaboratively.

I suggest that all the experiences what you learn can be part of the course materials what you develop - you just need to backup it with theory arguments from some literature sources.

Re:5. Week (30.3.-5.4.): Reflection (Mikko)

I was reading 5. Week (30.3.-5.4.): Reflection (Mikko) on Blogs for the red sun.. and just to comment shortly of my absence - ther was an e-learning conference last week and then i fell slightly ill, so i try to catch up all the actions.

Have you already posted/mailed the calls to all the members to use the Google groups. maybe some of us are not aware how to use it?

what goes on in our group space

We have had group space for a week but since not all of the members of this group have become participants of it yet, i make today a small mirror post here. Please try to make yourself an account to google groups to contribute in our own space!

Here is what Mikko, sami and Kai have written so far:

The function of this page is to list all of the matters concerning our course design, and also work as a template that we could use to give suggestions to the design. The ideas and topics presented here now are mere suggestions on behalf of Mikko & Sami and are ment to raise conversation. Every member is allowed to give their ideas and comments either to this page or by posting to the discussion area.
General matters concerning the course
Course subject

• Suggestion (Sami & Mikko): Use of blogs as tools in an eLearning course. 
  • Comment (Sami): This is an example comment. 
  • Comment (Kai): One principle of selecting learning environments is to pick teh same learning environment for the course participation what you want to teach as a course topic. This is wise because then people can start getting feeling of how learning in different types of blogs might work out. Besides working in one environment and trying to understand the principles of an another environment may be taking too much cognitive resources. 
  • You can leave your comments here by following the notation above: Suggestion (Name) or Comment (Name)
    

Course goals

• Suggestion (Sami & Mikko): The course would explain the main principles behind blogs as tools for eLearning and also provide the skillset for concrete use of blogs for university level students. 
  1. The course would also cover how to use RSS feeds effectively and give examples to different software solutions. 
  2. After the course students would be fluent in using these technologies and they would be able to profoundly understand the characteristics of the used technology and its limitations as media. 
  3. In addition to this, the learners would understand what is required to make these solution work as effective learning tools.

Course design principles

 

•  Suggestions (Kai): you could think at what kind of learning experiences blogs would give, and if the course needs more teacher- or learner-centred design.
• Secondly, one design model we keep in mind is for general instructional design approach, meaning how we as ateam will work. Another aspect is  what are the important comonents in the course design and how we put it together.
  

 

Learner analysis 

• Suggestion (Sami & Mikko):The learners possess basic Internet skills (surfing, email,…). Some learners might already have previous knowledge on blogs, and for them the course would provide guiding on how to use apply this knowlege in a pedagogically “correct” manner.
•  (Kai): Will the learners start new blogs or come with their different existing blog solutions? Will the solution be communal blog for the group or the aggregation of individual blogs?
  

 

Design process

• Suggestion (Mikko): One week iterations in which the group would generate a small portion of the course and evaluate it.  
• 
  

 

Course process 

 

Course design

 

Pedagogical model

 

Used technologies

• Suggestion (Sami & Mikko):
  1. Blogs (Reflection of learning)
     
  2. RSS Aggregators (Client software and web based)
     
  3. Wiki (Main access point, asynchronous communication, group work)
     
  4. Google calendar (scheduling)
     
  5. Instant messaging (synchronous)
  • Comments (Kai): Maybe wiki is too much? I suggest to take a look at widgets for integration with other tools (eg. what are supported and what are not), another issue might be what kind of artifact mashups weblogs enable? This would limit the software issues. How about possible pedagogical uses of blogs (individually, groups, aggregated groups?) The roles of the students and tutor in blog-based learning? Premises and pitfalls of blog-based learning?
    

Roles (of course design)

• Suggestion (Sami & Mikko): Question: Is this what the week task was after? Kai: We need to think what working model we follow, cooperative or collaborative work? basically if we divide tasks or share and recruit tasks.
  
  1. Pedagogical expert
  2. Technology expert
  3. Evaluation and instruction designer
  4. Task designer
  5. Content designer
  6. Course managament designer (schedules, resources, concrete matters, etc.)

Roles (of course implementation)

 (kai):I would integrate designer and implementation works since you end with the small prototype but will not teach there.

 

Content design

• Suggestion (Sami & Mikko):
  1. Course introduction (background of the course, goals, tasks, schedule, general “how to” for the course)
  2. Reading material for background of blogs
  3. Reading material for technological background of blogs
  4. Reading material for pedagogical use of blogs
  5. Guide to setting up a blog
  6. Guide to using a blog
  7. Guide to using RSS feeds and aggregators
  8. (Kai): Will the course focus on one blog provider or many? This will increase the number of technical solutions that kingt be discussed

Task design

 

 

 

Schedule

 

Evaluation design

 

 

 

Course implementation 

 

 

Reflection week 4

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

This week i learned that if students disappear, the only thing that works is not distant prompts by mail, but local people can help you out. We seem to be all needing some support, sympathy and understanding from real humans when we get stuck.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

We had meeting with facilitators to share our experiences strategies and problems so far. That was very interesting and helpful to see and advance my own strategy with my group.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Not really.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

main question is how to reach these group members who are not active. Local facilitators and local peer help was helpful to figure out why people are missing. I hope it helps them to come back and join the group.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

email, blog, skype, modle

in skype we had some social talk with Damir

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

With my students, with faciliators (igor, krassen, terje), and  some students from other groups in moodle

Re:A Good and a Bad course design

I was reading A Good and a Bad course design on Pan Narrans and also the other (Mart, Damir, Mikko) descriptions of good and bad course designs from blogs. I thought it is about time to bring together some aspects you refer to in blogs, but especially the comments you have made to each other’s examples.

Comments are very interesting! This is definitely what you should do, reading what the others have wtitten and expressing your own ideas on top of their ideas, it works like brainstorming in a way, reminding us more things.

Bad course:

- eLearning as means of resource saving

- held totally virtually because of resource cuts

- videos and PP-slides from lectures that were held way back are placed in to the eLearning environment and students are to download and watch these and at the end of the course, take an exam

- no means of interacting with either course personnel or others students

- interaction is purely one-way

- no materials that would scaffold the learning

- quality of the provided materials is low

- an improper use of media effectively makes it unsuitable for its purpose

- no feedback after exam to see how well student met the goals of the course

- naive use, and undesigned use of technology can really just make things worse

- use of videos: How many people would watch hours after hours of a lecturers head droning on their screen?

- too easy course materials and tasks

- read a few books, see you in exam style

- teacher gives pages in books which students should learn, bunch of definitions, theoretical stuff, everything followed by old manuals and textbooks, no practice examples, internet links or similar

- reading text in internet and doing online tests

- Teacher-student relationship is very strict

- Bad use of the learning environment - lack of opportunities

- the only innovative thing of the course that it is online

- No new experience

Good course:

- explicit goals, rules of how to act

- course structure that was based on a pedagogical model

- real feedback and communications channels

- set scaffolds

- clear evaluation methods

- good quality materials

- course took advantage of two different social technological tools, which use was justified pedagogically

- facilitators were keen on getting feedback to improve this course later on

- facilitators were open listen

- quite a lot of freedom to settling the actual internals of the goals and ways to achieve them

- more space for the learners to take responsibility and have freedom on structuring and guiding their learning

- the level of freedom is dependent on the course domain

- course worked mainly as a general framework which gave an outline to students

- course is relatively short

- course requires that the learners acquire basic knowledge, like general terms and theory

- media delivers a message, the limitations are considered, how does this media actually support learning is thought of

- an intensive course that has a lot of content

- lecturer activates the audience by posing questions and then demonstrates what the consequences would be based on to their answers

- from time to time a student will ask a question that the lecturer has never thought of but tries to find a solution

-learners can not learn only from our own errors, but also from the errors others have made giving them multiple perspectives to a single problem

- students are taught how to actually use something in real-life, they need to activate the theory in order to understand how everything actually works

- - students have to apply the information they have learned by integrating the theory to practice

- assignment is a real-life problem that needs to be solved

- small group of students

- well organized,

- lessons are followed by examples

- activities are placed on calendar

- students get additional links for additional resources

- course uses internal forum and mail service

- all questions, answers and discussions are in one place

- a lot of interesting individual work

- flexibility by learning online

- there should be some online assignment which would more than just answering a., b. or c

- something visual in materials, because this will attract attention for sur, and it will be memorized and understood more easily

See if you agree or disagree some of these points? Something to add? I think it might serve as a good way to discuss what you actually would expect of your own group’s e-learning course prototype.

reflection week 3

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
This week i was thinking about what makes some students motivated to learn and what was the motivation of participating this course for these students who are not seemingly very motivated.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I found it quite interesting to think of the posts students wrote as assignments. It is not trivial what i as a facilitator should repky. Somehow it seems to reply well done is not enough. For me the learning is happening both sides and a well done post can also be such that raises a question, where i can start thinking and constructing my thought of arguments and learn myself.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
I think if to use Read plugin, it is not well thought out how people without plugin activated could interact or be requested to be participating in mashed feeds of the Read plugin. It seems one of the major faults of such technology.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
There was some talk of scaffolding and raising intrinsic motivation in teams what we were discussing with some students. I had to go and read some of the papers to answer about intrinsic motivation, however i believe there is still much there to be found about this issue, especially from different research results.

Another interesting issue is the relationship of pedagogical course design and the viewpoint of instructional systems designer to be combined in new systems and learning design.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (e.g. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

I used mostly weblog and email. I checked out some wikis and  the tools the students were suggesting to give them advice about choosing the tool for group collaboration.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I communicated with the students from my group by mail and by weblog. At some cases i did commenting in their weblogs, other cases i used mashed feed.

Re:Reflection, Week 2

I was reading Reflection, Week 2 on Pan Narrans and there was a line that made me think:

How to compensate for a lack of intrinsic motivation within the group. Can we actually make a group work at all if the members are not motivated?

To explain the term: intrinsic motivation is the motivation to perform the activity for itself to feel pleasure and satisfaction of the activity. High job control or high social support can increase intrinsic motivation.

I hope in our groups the latter is favoured.

Some other ideas of increasing motivation are involving group members into discussing the grading.

There have been some studies showing that expectations of getting rewards on performance (extrinsic motivation) will decrease intrinsic motivation.

The claim is that when individuals are rewarded for performing a task, they will come to like the task less and spend less time on it once the rewards are no longer forthcoming. Rewards are said to destroy people’s intrinsic motivation.

A meta-analytic review of experiments on the topic, however, shows that under some conditions, rewards actually enhance people’s motivation and performance (Cameron, Banko, & Pierce, 2001). Specifically, when people are offered a tangible reward (e.g., money) to meet a designated performance level, studies show increases in measures of intrinsic motivation.

Of course, we do not have money to increase motivation here I hope the grade is a tangible reward as well.

Another study claims that students in the learning-oriented context have significantly higher intrinsic motivation than those in the performance-oriented context.

In this study they also assume that learning-goal orientation and solution development are significantly related when students participate in the learning-oriented, heterogeneous peer grouping treatment group.

So i think potentially our groups are like this?

It is suggested that motivation is higher if students can be more autonomous from facilitator.

Re: Sonjas reflection on groupwork

Today Sonja has made a very good proposition in her weblog reflection for the week.

In this post she shares her experiences of working as a group and suggests few environments that you as a group might be using.

I think ideas from this post can open a good line of discussion where you finally can find your group space to collaborate.

reflection week 2

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?

This week taught me that it is hard to compose groups in distributed environment when people do not use same set of tools.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Some of students’ posts were extremely good and interesting.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

I would like to know better what are the trends ingroup formation in such distributed settings. However, i think it is possible only throgh different experiences.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

One idea was to start reflection posts in the beginning of the week to keep better track but publish them only in the end of the week. I also thought that sending emails to my group might be encouraging.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

This tools i used blog and moodle. In moodle i looked wiki and initiated forum. I also used email. One very cool tool what i tested this week was hypertopia.com

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

In the beginning of week i started to contact with the students who assigned to my group. I used both weblog comments and the Read plugin requests/offer and mashed feed for contacting. Then i decided to send to all my students an instructional email pointing out how we might manage to work together a s a group. Mostly there was some links to my posts in weblog. I felt it is needed for the students who didn’t activate their weblog reader plugins.

I also wrote a comment to Alfonso’s weblog.

I also went to the weblog of Tiina and sent there a comment about Moodle forum she requested for. And i was this week reading some posts in the Facilitatorspace where facilitator’s had questions. I wrote some comments there.

I contacted with Barbara and Terje via Skype and one of my the students, Damir added my Skype address.