EDDL 5141

EDDL 5141 Week 6 Activity 1

By scook February 23, 2020 February 18, 2020

Learning Activity 1 – Online Assessment: Post in your Portfolio

Part 1 Analyze the assessments and the educational technology supports used. Assess how well the assessments align to the learning outcomes

The course is 4 weeks long, self-paced and requires 5-7 hours of effort each week and is made up of a wide range of learning activities such as polls, surveys, word clouds, discussions, annotations and written assessments. Differentiation is only evident through learner outcome as shown on the rubrics. For the written assessments, worth 37% of the overall grade, learners self and peer mark answers. There is no feedback from any instructor in this course; the communications are one way and no other professional teaching expertise is provided beyond this learner-content interaction (Moore, 1989). The criterion serves to provide some guidance to the learner on the acceptable level of behavior expected (McLeod, 2003).

Due to the asynchronous nature of this online course and the diversity in learner’s needs and learning styles, the design and facilitation of the course has been influenced by many principles of learning theory. Periodically throughout the course there are participation checks. These early and frequent assessments (Gagne, 1965) are integrated into the learning sequence to check learner achievement and provide appropriate feedback (Ally, 2008). This lends itself to the Behaviourist model as responses are reinforced by positive or negative feedback; in this case a green check, praise and a mark. Following the ARCS model, this creates satisfaction in the learner as they are immediately praised and rewarded for this participation and so a sense of accomplishment is achieved (Pappas, 2015).

The syllabus quiz given at the start of the course is used to model expectations and ensure that learners are aware of what the course entails. The course design here elicits the desired behaviours and so this method works well as the answers are objective. These explicit outcomes are reinforced not only with the learning objectives introduced at the start of the course but also with the overall pass rate (65%) being displayed to learners. This design decision impacts the course as it starts very gently but with clear expectations allowing the learner to understand exactly what the rest of the course will look like. I think this is really useful as it takes away the fear of the unknown and allows learners to feel in control of their own progress. The minimum expectations are made explicit and the introduction activities allows learners to reflect on their previous knowledge, explore ideas from their peers and build a sense of community and connection with their fellow learners.

Part 2 Identify a potential online assessment to measure one or two of the learning outcomes that you identified for the online teaching and learning experience that you would like to design for your Online Design Plan Assignment and provide a rationale.

I would like to design an online teaching and learning experience for students to explore the reality of the workplace to help them explore career paths. This would be a 2 lesson mini-unit.

By the end of the unit you will be able to:

Independently explore a career by using a range of digital tools
Evaluate the suitability of a career against your personal skills

I envisage the activity to look like:

Skills profile audit- online
Virtual field trip
Reflection/evaluation

The skills audit is a formative assessment that provides feedback and a suggested profile/ list of skills and so will allow students to use this when assessing the suitability of the career researched. It will also allow me to modify my teaching plan and learning experiences’ (Sewell, J, Frith, K.H & Colvin, M.M 2010) in order to suit the needs of learners. After participating in the virtual field trip, students will use critical thinking. I may possibly adopt the ‘one-minute’ technique as it will allow students to summarize the most important aspect of their learning and reflect upon it and/or incorporate the muddy puddle ideas so that students can identify where they need clarification. Regardless of how this reflections occurs, it will be presented in their e-portfolio.

References

Gagné, R. M. (1965). The conditions of learning and theory of instruction (1st ed.). New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

McLeod, G. (2003) Learning theory and instructional design. Learning Matters: The Journal of the Durham Technical Community College 2(1), 35-43. Retrieved from https://library.digitalnc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/yearbooks/id/8404/rec/1

Pappas, C. (2015, May 20). Instructional design models and theories: Keller’s ARCS model of motivation [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://elearningindustry.com/arcs-model-of-motivation

Sewell, J., Frith, K. H., & Colvin, M. M. (2010). Online assessment strategies: A primer. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 6 (1), 297. Retrieved from “http://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no1/sewell_0310.pdf”