Developing a Rubric

Rubrics are the tools which help to measure the degree to which learners are acquiring knowledge, skills and attitude, that was intended. Rubrics provide us with a way to evaluate and provide feedback on learning process. Rubrics also give details of the practical and conceptual outcomes of the process and the product. Instructors record the learners’ progress and report the feedback through rubrics. They can further be used in collaborative learning environment where fellow leaners are involved in the creation of the rubrics(We are going to do this for our final papers)

My proposed course is ABCs of Chemistry and the target audience is learners from a variety of the science and health-related fields, proficient in 10th grade reading and math. I’ll use rubrics to lay the guidelines to develop a new course. Rubrics are a tool for the evaluation of the existing course and revise them as per the suggestions. Rubrics help in identifying what kind of technology tools are just the right match for a given online course.  I also see rubrics useful in reflecting upon student to student and student to instructor interaction strategies. Rubrics also provide an evidence on how ‘web-based tools can play in the active learning process and  interactive assessment’.( Byers, C. (2002). Interactive assessment and course transformation using web-based tools. Retrieved from http://technologysource.org/article/interactive_assessment_and_course_transformation_using_webbased_tools/) 

Web content accessibility

The accessibility issue I’ll like to take is alternative modes of presenting information (auditory, visual, text) and color blindness.  I plan to use following alternative techniques to present the information:

Providing text equivalent for every non-text items- As the mouse is rolled over the graphic, animation, charts, image or map, the Internet explore shows the text box describing the information conveyed.  The assistive technology devices (screen readers and Braille displays) can read the text associated with the image. For the detailed text explanation of charts and graphs, there can be a linked page.

Transcription of audio and video content- This technique is useful for people with vision and hearing impairments. The transcript can be synchronous, i.e. plays with the audio or video content, also called as captions, or can be, what is known as audio descriptions. It only displays important information from the video or audio of a multimedia presentation. The transcripts may or may not be the part of the same webpage.

Use of context and markup to convey any information when color is used: Cognizance of the combinations of foreground and background colors by choosing highly contrastive colors for the foreground and background. It is also very important because people with different types of color deficits or for people who are using monochrome displays need to have sufficient contrast.

I will take up the role of a content specialist and I would like to be the part technology team. The reason is that I’m not a pure technologist, so I better be assisting a technologist. 

References:

Wendy Chisholm, T. R. &. D. C. (1999). Web content accessibility guidelines 1.0. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/.

Beyers, C. (2002) Interactive Assessment and Course Transformation Using Web-Based Tools http://technologysource.org/article/interactive_assessment_and_course_transformation_using_webbased_tools/ 

Developing a Rubric

While I was going through the website-Rubistar.com given in the course material of week 4, I synthesized that an instructor or evaluator must follow some steps to develop the rubrics. The first and foremost important task is to define the learning outcome or objective of the product/course/lesson. The instructor/evaluator should define possible highest performance to the lowest performance levels that students would possibly demonstrate. Make sure that each level should be directly observable. To describe each level, as high quality, average, and low, evaluator must have at least three samples of each level. The samples will help to evaluate the students’ performance.

Assign numerical or qualitative, or a combination of both, score for each level, from highest to lowest, or vice versa.

Once each level is determined, give the descriptions on how to use this. Ask students to give the feedback. This will make sure that each level is clearly understood by the students and what each level represents in relation to scores assigned. This kind of feedback ensures that students clearly understand how they are being evaluated and the standards that they are being held accountable to achieve. Rubrics are a great way  to  help students self- diagnose strengths and weaknesses of their own work and  they become part of the "self assessment" process.

Good Practice for Assessing Students

I just finished reading - 9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning  from the course material of week 4. This paper gives a deeper insight of what are the best practices of assessing the learning. The paper starts with a universal fact that assessment is not in end itself but it is a vehicle for educational improvement. I remember when we were in school and, after we had our final exam done, we used to say- I’ll never see these books again. But the truth is that those books laid foundation for the next year and assessment made that foundation even stronger.

Assessment is not mere demonstration of some crammed facts, spitted out on paper in form of one word answers, choosing right answer of filling the blanks. It is much more than that. Assessment should find the level multidimensional and integrated performance over the time. For focused and clear assessment, it should have a clear goal so that what are the expected outcomes of the learning can be described and achieved.  assessment can also help instructors and the curriculum developers to see what are the best teaching practices and the environment for learning. Episodic assessment such as having half yearly or the final exams may not be a good practice for the learning outcomes. The assessment which is continuous and ongoing and take various tools into consideration will assess the learners on the basis of improvement they have shown over a period of time.

Consider, a 6^th grade student who has to appear for traditional final exams in the school next week, but couldn’t study because of prevailing home conditions - a sick father and full time working mom. If he couldn’t do better in exam, then generalizing that he is not good at studies is purely wrong.

The other fact which this paper reveals is that it shouldn’t be the instructor/teacher who is solely responsible for the assessment of students but student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators, and students can also  play an important role in overall assessment of a learner.

I really liked the ideas presented in this paper as they throw light on what  assessment basically is. In India, most of the schools judge students’ performance by looking at the mark sheet obtained at the end of the year. But, I am happy to find that things are changing and continuous and comprehensive assessment is being practiced by many schools now a days.

Authentic Assessment vs traditional assessment

In this post, I'll try to answer the question raised in Lecture 4. The questions were-What do you think? How will you deal with the issue of assessment? What impact will it have on whatever instructional strategies you select to facilitate learners' accomplishment of learning objectives?

I believe that  authentic assessment examines student performance on worthy intellectual tasks. Projects, case studies, observations and reporting are kind of this. They ‘directly examine student’s  performance on worthy intellectual tasks’ . But this kind of assessment is good for document-based historical inquiry, literature review, research, theoretical based reading and learning, providing an engaging oral analysis of a recent political event; collaborating with others on a debate, etc. I think that traditional ways of assessment like quiz, multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks and similar tools are good if instructor needs to evaluate student problem-posing and problem-solving in mathematics, experimental research in science and some kind of medical exams. Assessing students only on the authentic or the traditional assessment methods can be unfair. There has to be a balance of these two assessment methods in order to best judge the learning outcomes.

Authentic assessments may provide ‘valid indicators or predictors of academic performance’. Authentic assessment also has the advantage of providing parents and community members with directly observable products and understandable evidence concerning their students' performance. The traditional way of assessment is still used in many areas of learning because of the convenience and low cost.

The instructor has to choose the assessment methods very carefully so that the  academic achievement of learners doesn’t only come in terms of writing ‘right’ answers. The impact of the method choose by an instructor can help learners improve overall performance and if student can craft polished, thorough and justifiable answers, performances or products. 

References

Wiggins, Grant (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2). Retrieved April 25, 2012 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=2&n=2 . This paper has been viewed 184,219 times since 11/13/1999

Polls in online courses

While I submitted my poll yesterday night,  a thought came into  my mind that polls can be a great tool for students to make choices. Polls are also  called as virtual show of hands and let all students see aggregate totals of how the class thinks on  a particular issue. Poll results help in shaping the opinion and sometimes realizing the limitation of their own choices. At a point of discussion which has become very crucial, poll activates interactivity among the classmates. Polls should provoke research and deeper thinking.
Asynchronous polls are available for learners to vote over a period of time before submitting the votes. Asynchronous polls let learners visit and vote on their own schedule. Synchronous polls have learners pick from a list of alternatives and then see results of the voting. It helps  learners to make real time choices.
For using the poll, instructor has to take into account a few things. The first thing is to make sure that learners know how to vote. The language should be clear and straight. Make sure  test questions can be interpreted as intended. Test the questions with someone and refine if necessary. The polls should display the totals only. The students may hesitate to vote if they feel others can know how they individually voted.
I liked voting for the  Thread Rules Survey because it will help us in finding the best practices related to the thread management. The poll will throw a light on the best practices among the all those were suggested by all class members. Further debating on the each issue would polish the poll result .

Use of videos for teaching online courses

I started this week’s reading material with Merrill on Instructional Design video available in course material area of week 4. I got a feeling that  vodcast or using videos encourage the learners to view the learning material and grasp the application of concepts, rules and procedure in action. The video can be found or uploaded on Youtube, teacherTube, google videos, MIT world, Yahoo, MSNBC video and BBC video nation. There are certain other tools and websites having online free videos on reports, news and procedures.

How are videos helpful-There are several thousand videos available on web that have some relevancy to the teaching and learning of the subject matter that one might want to take up. One may find many videos on a particular topic. Course developers need to consider indexing or rating of the  ones that look relevant. Instructor might want to develop her/his own video or customize and reuse existing ones after obtaining the required permissions.  Learners may be given some questions to answer for reflection and discussion at the end.  Short 5-8 minutes videos are best for most of the topics. For the educational use of the videos,  fair use of  copyright guidelines should be followed carefully.

How can videos be used in online learning-The instructor can also ask learners to give feedback on the videos included in the course material. This would help to determine which ones were more effective and why. In such case, the instructor will have a ranking of the available videos from the learners from previous quarters/semesters. This kind of ranking will increase satisfaction among the students and also address the issue on video quality, length, and appropriateness.