What gets graded in courses

Interesting blog post by Maryellen Weimer today on the Faculty Focus website about grading and how to determine what assessments have the most value in a course. She doesn't discuss technology or online classes, but I think the role of technology in teaching and learning is changing how people learn and how they should be assessed. I like the point she makes about what should be valued:

Exams also test the ability to recall knowledge or to demonstrate thinking within time constraints and without access to resources. Is that one of the most important skills students should take from the course and their college learning experiences?

As she points out, we often do things because that's the way we've always done them, whether or not they remain relevant. How learning is assessed influences what students spend their time on in a course. This is easy to test in an online course -- when forums are graded, usually all students will participate in order to get a good grade. When forums are not graded, participation, in my experience, is more authentic, but often limited to those students who actually have questions or are interested in exploring an idea.

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Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A...

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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