From boring to blogging part 3

Wordle of the instructions

Well, it has been a while. I was expecting to finish the third installment of this wiki assignment story earlier. I got delayed for several reasons, some of them really good reasons. That includes being included by one college in an "academic leadership something" committee to encourage the adoption of innovative approches to education. I was also asked to submit a list of examples of those approaches in my classes to be showcased in a video in a faculty technology website. In another college I was asked if I would give a webinar on use of wikis and blogs in online courses. I have been learning about online teaching and pedagogy quite intensely for the past year or so, so starting to see some results feels really good. 

I finished the Designing Effective Online Assessments course in a typical clueless student frenzy. The course had assignments of increasing complexity: generating SLOs (Student Learning Outcomes), designing traditional and non-traditional assignments for them, and finalize with a complete roadmap of SLOs and the assignments with a timetable. Drafts were to be posted on Wednesdays, we would give and receive feedback from other students by Friday, and revised assignments were due by Sunday. Last week's assignment instructions said to post the roadmap of at least one SLO, which I did, wondering why my team mates were posting all their SLOs. Sunday around 8pm I realized that the final submission indeed involved ALL SLOs...oopsie! Luckily I am really good at working under stress and I managed to submit the completed document just before midnight. That gave me some insight of being an online student, and why there is no such as too many warnings and reminders about deadlines. 

With the draft of my new wiki developed I moved on to a fuller version. I decided to try it on a f2f class with high enrollment as a group project. I established a set of rules in order to preempt situations I had seen in group projects and used some of the advice given by Tori Bovard regarding online debates. In her presentation during OTC2011 she emphasized the need for group agreements regarding group work, such as clearly assigning responsibilities within the group (submitter, spell-checker), as well as procedures if students are MIA. Those agreements were to be submitted before the beginning of the actual project, providing not only a framework to handle future issues, but also an an exercise in collaboration and consensus. I also included requirements for group and individual postings (basically establishing that each student had to post something on a regular basis), content and quality of the wiki postings, quality of feedback to others, and possibility for extra points. It became a 3 page document and I am curious to see how it works. I will keep you posted as the assignment is planned for October this year. For my completely online course where this idea came from, I will probably use a similar rubric except that it will be an individual assignment, and it will include regular blog postings as well.

I will not bore you with the 3 page document, but here is the grading rubric:

Aspect evaluated	Poor	Good	Excellent	Max Total Points
Content (group)	Covers less than 3 aspects of the content (see above)	Covers at least 5 aspects	Covers all aspects	10
Content (quality)	Content is incomplete or incorrect	Content is not up to date, or incomplete	Content is up to date, detailed, and relevant	10
Presentation (group)	Only uses text OR Uses 2 types of content, but it is hard to read/observe.	Uses 2 types of content	Uses 3 or more types of content (text, pictures, video etc) Fonts and pictures are easy to read and observe. Correct spelling and grammar, good text flow	5
References	No references.	Less than 3 references, or 3 but incorrectly formatted	3 references, correctly formatted	5
Participation (group)	Only posting on week 7	Missing one	All required postings	5
Participation (individual)	Only posting on week 7	Missing one	All required postings	5
Feedback (Individual)	No or irrelevant feedback provided	Provides helpful feedback with some suggestions	Provides thoughtful and insightful feedback given with clear suggestions for making significant improvements	5
Timeliness (individual)	No or late submission for original post and feedback	Late submission for either original post or feedback	Timely submission for both original post and feedback	5
Total possible				50
Extracredits (individual)	Weekly participation (2p), creative/WOW effect (2p)			4

Dear Readers, what do you think? I would love to hear your advice and/or comments. I am still in time to change it...:)

From Boring to Blogging: An Educational Experiment, part 1

In the next blog postings I would like to share my experience with moving from an "old-fashioned" summative assessment to a formative assessment in an online Microbiology class. The first part will give a background of the change and my plan to implement it. The second part will relate how did it go. In the third part I will add some recent thoughts about the assignment, thanks to a course on effective online assessments that I am taking now.

THE PLAN

“Changing a boring assignment into a formative one w/ blog and wiki for my coming online #microbiology course @UCSD Extension http://bit.ly/ewssum”. This I tweeted on March 27th. I was fired up.

What did I have in mind?

As most academics who go into teaching, for many years I taught the way I was taught (lectures, exams, and let the students sink or swim). However, in the past year or so  I have been increasingly drawn towards novel educational approaches.  A course that changed many of my perceptions of education and social media was Building Online Community With Social Media (BOCSM) This course is part of California’s @One Online Teaching Certification Program. Among the many insights I gained during that course, one that stood up was the requirement of writing regular blog posts  and a final essay describing our perception of the course. I grumbled at the assignment mainly because of my lack of time, but when I finished it (a version of which can be found here) it brought a shift in my perception of blogging. So when the time came to refresh an online course I have taught for a couple of years, I felt strongly about introducing this kind of assignment.

This particular Microbiology course has a heterogeneous student population, usually a mix of science professionals who want to learn about microbiology (often chemists or geneticists), some pre-med or pre-nursing students, and occasional lay persons interested in microbiology (lawyers, teachers). In order to bridge this diversity I aim at a middle level of basic microbiology knowledge (evaluated through quizzes), and make the assignments personalized. Students usually complete 3 individual assignments related to different topics, and the usual format has been “written project.”

What was implemented?

I wanted the course to include a mixture of summative and formative assessments. The idea of a learning journey with frequent feedback and advice, and occasional stops for reflection was very appealing.

This was the setup:

• Assignment 1 was a “current microbiology topic”  during the second week of class. Students were asked to pick a topic and create a wiki page about it, and collaborate with each other commenting and adding/editing information. My main goal with this assignment was to get students familiarized with the wiki format while doing research on microbiology. As grading guidelines, I posted that grading would be based on 1) participation (new page, or more than 50% of an established page), 2) variety of sources (at least 2 types of contribution, text and something else: pictures, videos etc, 3) interaction (editing and/or commenting on at least 2 other topics).
• Assignment 2 was about a microbial disease. Students chose a disease from a list (although if they had a personal preference they could discuss it with me), created a personal wiki page dedicated to it. Grading was dependent on the content of their page and comments on other students’ pages.
• I considered Assignment 3 the “jewel” of my formative idea. I asked the students to post during their first week of class a topic that really interested them in microbiology  and why. I wanted them to reflect on how their understanding of that topic changed during the course, so I encouraged them to write weekly blog posts about the class, but required only one in the last week (which was graded). I also gave them the chance to choose a format for their assignment, such as wikis, articles, porwerpoint presentations etc. In my enthusiasm for the assignment I made the mistake of not writing a precise grading rubric stating the expectations of the assignment (more of this in the next post).

Some practical issues

Finding a platform to place the assignments was harder than I thought. The official course used a version of Blackboard lacking collaboration tools. I wanted to have the blog and wiki options in the same place. After some searching the solution came in the form of Coursesites, a website by Blackboard that allows educators to create up to 5 courses using the functionality of Bb 9.1. I adopted a Project-based course template and created 3 wikis and a blog.

I had a very low enrollment, seven students, which in hindsight was probably a blessing. In early April, the course went live.

(stay tuned for the next part about how did the experiment go, and what was the student feedback).