Module 7: Reflective Journal

This week was so extraordinary - Southern California had 23 fires at one time. Luckily, this weekend the weather cooled down, the gusty winds vanished, it even drizzled, and the nine fires left are at least half contained. My classmates from three classes have been very supportive - I've received messages through emails, this blog, and at the discussion forums. We all live so far away from each other, and even though we haven't met each other in person, being in class together for 7 weeks so intensely does build a strong sense of community. I greatly appreciated my classmates words of concern and prayers in these difficult times.

I spent mostly Friday and Saturday working on the final project. Instead of posting a link to it, I decided to print it in the blog:

Assessment of Student Learning in the Online Classroom
Final Project by Beatrice Tseng
Fall 2007

The online course I’m designing this project for is Spanish 4, a 5 unit, 17 week course. The student population is mainly adults. Now and then I may have a 15 or 17 year old high school student, but for the most part, students range from 18 to 70 years old, full time and part-time students, professionals working full time who can not attend a F2F course, parents with young children, retirees who likes to travel to and/or plans to live in a Spanish speaking country, students seeking to fulfill their graduation language requirement, and students whose significant other speaks Spanish.

The four assessment tools I’m considering for this class are: online quiz builder, discussion forum, wiki and blog. The first two tools are available in Blackboard, the course management system we use at our college. The last two are two new tools I learned in this class which I would like to incorporate in my online course. Below is the description of four objectives, how I am going to apply each of these tools to the objectives and the benefits and challenges of each tool.

OBJECTIVE #1: By the end of the course, students will be able to distinguish and differentiate between the two past tenses (preterit vs. imperfect) and the two present tenses (indicative vs. subjunctive). A Successful learning outcome would be for students to score 80% or above in the quiz.

Bloom’s taxonomy: comprehension.

Assessment tool: there will be an ONLINE QUIZ on each of these grammatical points upon completion of the chapter. The CMS used at my college is Blackboard, so I would use Blackboard’s quiz/test builder instead of Survey Monkey’s. Both online quizzes will consist of two parts:

• Multiple choice – students need to choose the correct answer, either A or B.
• Fill in the blank – students need to conjugate and write the correct verb.
  The online quiz will test the students’ understanding of the information and grasp of concept.

Benefits:

For the facilitator:

• The quiz builder is fairly easy to set up and grade.
• It will take time in the beginning, but once set up, the quiz can be used again in the future.

For the learner:

• The quiz is fairly easy to take – no need to be technologically savvy: the first part, the student just need to click on the right answer (multiple choice), and the second part, the student write the correct verb conjugation.
• Student can get instant feedback on the result of his quiz (except for essay sections where the instructor needs to manually score it).

Challenges:

Internet may be disconnected while taking the test.

Students need to remember to use the language tool (Spanish) so the appropriate accent is placed on the right vowel when needed. Just in case the student is taking the test in a computer that is not his own and the language bar is not activated, in my instructions, I would ask students to use an apostrophe to designate the placing of an accent. For example: students can write yo hable’ instead of yo hablé.

May be a challenge for students who are nervous taking timed tests, not to mention it might be the first time a student is taking a test online.

OBJECTIVE #2: By the end of the course, students will be able to identify, discuss, compare and contrast various aspects of the Hispanic culture. A successful learning outcome would be for students to score 6 points or above every week.

Bloom’s taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis and synthesis.

Assessment tool: there will be weekly discussions in the DISCUSSION FORUM. Students are to answer two of the 4 discussion questions (maximum of 2 points each) and comment to at least 2 of their classmates’ responses (maximum of 1 point each). Discussion postings will be evaluated based on the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the each answer. In their answers to the discussion questions, students need to associate the knowledge gained through the readings and the video and relate it to their personal life. Comments will be evaluated based on substantive contribution towards the discussed topic. In their comments to classmates, students need to connect their experience with that of their classmate and integrate and create a new thought.

Benefits:

The questions are based on the cultural theme of the week and it draws on the experiences of the learner (principal element of andragogy).

Discussions create a strong sense of community and support among the learners and the facilitator.

Encourages authentic learning because each posting is a true reflection of the learner’s thoughts.

Discussion Forum includes questions related to video clips and/or music that students have watched and/or heard previously. The video clips and the songs will delight the visual and auditory learners.

The discussion forums can accept attachments such as video, audio and images which would accommodate a wider variety of learning styles.

Challenges:

Internet connection may be very slow thus taking a long time to download the video clip.

Internet may be disconnected while viewing the video clip.

If a student wrote his answer/comment in the message area of the Discussion Board and suddenly hit a wrong key which takes him out of the message area, student will lose everything he wrote unless he had pre-written his message in a word document.

For students who are not very comfortable in expressing themselves in writing and in Spanish, it might take them longer to write their thoughts in the discussion forum.

Facilitator will need to read every single posting in order to give appropriate credit for each student – it is VERY time consuming.

OBJECTIVE #3: By the end of the course, students will be able to compose well developed essays in Spanish of approximately 400 words. A successful learning outcome would be for students to score 100% in the composition.

Bloom’s taxonomy: synthesis and evaluation.

Assessment tool: WIKI will allow both the instructor and the student track every revision made in a central location.

Benefits:

For the facilitator:

Wiki pages are easy to create and access.

Can see the progress of the composition and evaluate the contributions of each individual.

Wiki maintains a record of every entry for easy reference to past drafts in the “Recent changes” and “History revision” pages.

No need to email each other the revised drafts. The essay is housed in a central location.

For the learner:

Wiki pages are easy to create, access and share.

Helps improve the most challenging aspect of writing – revisions/editing.

Students have the opportunity to turn in 3 drafts for each composition. In each draft, the revisions can be recorded in a different color making it visually clear who the author is (student, classmate or instructor).

This is a student-centered activity since every progress can be tracked and evaluated by both the student and the instructor.

There’s a history of every change/comment made to the document for easy reference in the “Recent changes” and “History revision” pages.

No need to email each draft to the facilitator – it’s housed in a central location – just need to email the URL.

Encourages authentic learning because the essay is the student’s own creation.

Challenges:

Composition can be read by millions of people.

If colors or initials are not used and the document is open to the public, there’s no way of tracking who’s editing what.

OBJECTIVE #4: By the end of the course, students will be able to assess and summarize their progress towards their learning goals established at the beginning of the course.

Bloom’s taxonomy: evaluation

Assessment tool: a BLOG account from Blogger.com is easy to set up and navigate. It’s an opportunity for students to weekly reflect on the topics learned and their participation in the discussions, evaluate their progress in the course, and communicate any concern they may have.

Benefits:

For the facilitator:

Blogger.com is very user friendly. Students shouldn’t have much trouble setting up the account, so facilitator doesn’t have to be too concerned about student’s frustration.

Formative way of assessing the students.

Can provide timely feedback to the students.

For the learner:

Blogger.com is very user friendly. Student does not need to be technologically savvy to create an account and navigate through its features.

Student can track the progress of his thoughts and learning through his weekly reflections. This is a very student-centered learning assessment activity.

Encourages authentic learning which is reflected in the student’s personal explanations and thoughts.

Comments by the instructor and/or classmates are also tracked.

Student can incorporate his classmates’ blog by adding their URL to his blog roster.

Student receives timely feedback from the facilitator.

Challenges:

• In order to be effective, it is recommended that the instructor set clear goals and guidelines, perhaps a set of questions for the students to reflect upon as they write their weekly blog.
• For the facilitator, it may be a very time consuming endeavor if done in conjunction with the weekly discussion forums.
• For students who are not very comfortable in expressing themselves in writing and in Spanish, it might take them longer to write their thoughts in the blog.

Plagiarism prevention: Among the four tools, the discussion forum is the ultimate plagiarism prevention. Students need to write on a weekly basis, and since all postings are “recorded,” it’s easy to see and evaluate the student’s writing style. His style in the discussion forums can be compared to his writings in the essays and blog reflections. There shouldn’t be much discrepancy. Besides, since the essays are in Spanish, I don’t think there’s a site yet that sells essays in Spanish. Furthermore, since all written assignments (discussions, essays and blogs) are based on students’ personal experiences and reflections, it is highly unlikely that a student can plagiarize his writings from the Internet or elsewhere. These writings require higher level critical thinking and are a result of very specific questions.

Conclusion: Taking into consideration all the benefits and challenges of each tool, I feel the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. An online quiz is appropriate to assess the student’s comprehension and grasp of grammatical concepts. It is easy to set up, and although it might be time consuming in the beginning, once created, it can be used infinite times in the future. The weekly discussions is one of the most effective ways of assessing the student’s comprehension of the theme discussed, application of the theme in his response to the discussion questions, and ability to analyze his classmates’ responses and to synthesize it. Among the four tools discussed, the discussion forum is the most collaborative of them and the one that fosters a strong sense of community among the learners and the facilitator. The wiki and the blog are effective student-centered tools because they reflect the student’s thoughts and learning progress. I’m looking forward to incorporating these recently discovered tools in my Spanish 4 online course which will be offered next semester.

Module 6: Reflective Journal

This was a good week for me. I managed to do all the assignments for my three courses early in the week and was able to dedicate more time to the discussions from Wednesday to Sunday. Doing assignments as early as possible is so important - one just never knows what will happen tomorrow.

I was planning on writing the weekly evaluations/reflections and finish up any discussions for the three classes on Sunday evening, but when I came home after dinner, around 6:15 p.m., there was a huge fire in the canyon area behind our home. It was nerve wracking because my husband wasn't around (he left for a training in northern CA and won't be back until Thursday) and my two little girls were very scared. I packed some of our belongins and took the girls to a friend's house, came back home again to gather a few more things and send messages to my three instructors.

We came back this morning and our home is OK. The fire is 30% contained - it's as close as 2 miles from our home. The dry climate and gusty winds of 60 mph fueled the fire (it is reported now that it's an arson) and we're still on alert until Wednesday. I'm writing from home now and will try to complete my assignments as much as I can.

Module 5: Reflective Journal

This week’s reading on Christine Casey’s “Studying the First Amendment: Exploring Truth in Journalism” and its application on the taxonomy of assessment was quite challenging. In the first activity, when we had to apply the learning objective and activities into the taxonomy, I felt many of the activities (as a whole) could have applied to more than one taxonomy. All activities needed a previous knowledge of the subject in order to comprehend the issue, and then be able to apply it in order to analyze it. There wasn’t a clear cut in many of them, but, it was a great analytical activity. It was reassuring to read my classmates comments and to know that I was not alone in my feelings.

I also read each group’s midterm project. I thought GROUP 1 was very creative in unifying their tools to a central theme: “Creating Cultural Connections.” The "Getting to know you" survey in Survey Monkey was very creative and also tied in with the cultural theme. EPals had great links, which helps the reader to visualize what this tool is all about. I read with great interest all about Adobe Connect since I've never tried Breeze and we were going to explore it on Saturday (yesterday).

GROUP 2's presentation looked very professional by including an image of each tool and a list of additional resources at the end. EPals, in particular, caught my attention because my daughter's 4th grade class started a class blog, and I wonder if eventually it will evolve to an EPal. I thought that this group’s last sentence "...we help prepare students to live, learn, and work in an ever-changing technological society" summarized beautifully the reason we are taking these courses.

GROUP 3 did a detailed review of each tool. In Survey Monkey, I especially liked the fact that it did not have advertisement, and I also liked the idea of a short formative assessment prior to the beginning of each module to assess students' understanding (or lack of) of the theme to be discussed in the new module. I appreciated the comparison made between Pageflakes and other reflection tools such as Blogger.com, which is the one I'm familiar with. As for wikis, I found the link "Example of Educational Wikis" at http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis to be very useful! Visually it gave me a broader sense of all the things that can be done in a wiki. My only experience with wikis has been editing documents and I was amazed to see so many other possibilities. I even found one Spanish class wiki!

The Breeze experience on Saturday was very useful, a total hands-on the tool. I thought it was great that we can orally communicate and even visually see each other (if we had the right equipment). I find it very useful that the session can be recorded for future reference and that it has a whiteboard. The only downfall is the technology itself. If it works properly; it’s wonderful, but when there are glitches or some interruptions, it can be frustrating. Nevertheless, it seems like distance education through Breeze is close to the experience of a F2F instruction with the advantage that the lecture can be recorded! This is amazing!

Final project update: The course I will be working on is my current Spanish 4 Online course, and after reading all the tools reviewed by the four groups, I’m considering the following: calendar, wiki, survey, quiz, and blog.

Module 4: Reflective Journal

This was a stressful week for me! My Instructional Design for Online Learning course started on Monday, and it is my third online course this semester besides this class and Creating Collaborative Communities which started last week. I had to plan a schedule (dedicate one day to one course) in order to be able to complete all assignments on time. Even then, I found myself doing most of the reflection assignments today, Sunday.

This week we needed to complete our collaborative midterm. We had four categories to choose from:

1. Quiz & test builders (Exam builder, Survey monkey, Zoomerang) - I chose not to choose this category because Blackboard, the courseware used at our college for online courses, comes with a test/quiz builder already.


2. Reflection assessment tool (Blogger.com, Schoolblogs.epals, OurStory, LiveJournal) - I did not choose this category because I've already learned about blogger.com in a previous activity and will be using it every week.


3. Peer-to-peer collaboration tools (Groove, Breeze, WebEx, Wikis) - my teammate Sharon had chosen to work on Groove, and I had knowledge about wikis already.


4. Course tracking tools (Excel spreadsheets, Micrograde, Teacherease, Calendar software) - I know how to use Excel and have been using Micrograde for many years. The calendar software attracted my attention because it's something I've never tried before, and I could think of several uses for my classes, online and F2F.

The calendar builder software http://www.rkssoftware.com/calendarbuilder/overview.html was VERY easy to use. It's very intuitive and offers many options of fonts, colors, header styles, icons, borders and clipart, and had the capability of inserting your own images. I liked the fact that it has Spanish among the language choices, and that I can choose to start the calendar on a Monday (which is the case in Spanish speaking countries). This calendar software can be downloaded for a 30-day free trial and purchased for $19.95, a one-time cost, which I thought was extremely affordable! I can use this software to create a calendar for my online course highlighting dates of homework, tests, cultural projects, composition due dates, cultural events in the local Hispanic community, movie nights, and tertulias (informal conversation gatherings on campus).

Two Fridays ago I proposed an initial deadline of Wednesday for our team to complete our individual assessment tool. Amid great frustration I was able to download the program Groove on Wedenesday after several tries, and on Thursday, Sharon and I met in Groove at 4 p.m. PST to try out its different features. We spent about 2 hours, the first 45 minutes on the phone and the rest communicating through the chat, and got a good general feeling about what Groove had to offer.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday our team members (Elli, Sharon and I) worked in wiki to polish our final presentation and published it on Sunday around 8 p.m. PST. Our wiki page is http://team4toolbox.pbwiki.com/Finished%20Doc and the password is team4. This was a very "hands on" activity using the wiki and gave me a much deeper understanding of its features and capabilities. It was an ideal tool for this collaborative midterm project!

On a side note: I just noticed after publishing this post that Blogger dated my post Saturday, the day I created the initial draft and not today, Sunday, when I finished my draft and was ready to publish it. I don't want to sound confusing: my writing talks about Sunday (today) but the publication is dated Saturday. Is there a way to change the date? I would appreciate any suggestions in this regard. Thank you.

Module 3: Reflective Journal

I enjoyed reading "The Perfect E-Storm." I was so surprised that the article listed 30 different emerging educational technologies. I never imagined there were so many possibilities! Many I have heard about, some I have actually experimented with, and others, I read about for the first time in this article.

The one technology that caught my attention among the 30 described is Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). I never thought these games would be considered an "educational technology." My daughters love playing "War of Warcraft" and I've been quite skeptical when my husband tells me that playing MMOGs enhances coordination, creativity, planning skills, critical thinking, decision-making, perceptual skills, and much more. But, after reading this article, I must give some credit to what he had said. If there's any way of somehow incorporating this type of MMOGs in our courses, be it F2F or online, I think we can retain and engage more students in active learning, and diminish the apathy that many students show towards school work and learning in general.


This week, we also created a concept map. The reading "From Puzzles to Problems: Assessiong the Value of Education in a Business Context with Concept Mapping and Pattern Matching" was quite dense. I believe the mapping created by Andersen Consulting is more suitable for corporations and institutions where complex goals and a large group of stakeholders are in play. For mapping the learning objectives of Spanish courses, I think the mapping process would be much simpler, like the one I created for this module (see image above) using a software called Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com/).

Class Wiki

Below is the link to the class wiki on "Guidelines for our course: Netiquette and Community Building." In the beginning, this "working" wiki had different colors and font sizes, but this finished product has a clean look and it's easy to read. :-)
http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/uofw_assessment_course/uofw_assessment_course?t&usermessage=&CFID=3621561&CFTOKEN=91691100&jsessionid=c2302632751164473998329

Module 2: Notes on the Interactive Inventory

I had mixed feelings while taking the interactive inventory. I couldn’t decide at first if to choose the answers based on my teaching practices or on my philosophical teaching beliefs. I opted for the latter, and all the answers I chose were learner-centered. But, I must confess that when it comes to assessment, I’m mostly a traditional instructor with emphasis on the right answers.

Could it be because it’s a language course (I teach Spanish), and the answers in grammar are either right or wrong? This is also true in the reading, listening and vocabulary comprehension sections of the tests. The only part that promotes and diagnoses the student’s learning is the essay portion of the test. The points received are based on the content and not on grammar perfection. Somehow I feel that this is the proper way of assessing a beginners Spanish course, to make sure the student has mastered the vocabulary and grammar covered in order to continue and succeed in the next level.

On the other hand, I can see more flexibility in assessment in intermediate and definitely in the advanced levels of Spanish courses. I can see a combination of right answers for grammar tests and having projects, papers and portfolios to assess the student’s learning. At these levels, most of the students who enroll are truly interested learners of Spanish; many of them are professional adults who are taking these courses to improve their Spanish and not for the grade or to transfer the units. I believe this type of students is the ideal one for a student-centered course: motivated, mature, asks questions, and is comfortable at reflecting, self-directing, managing, and evaluating his/her own learning.