This article was much in line with what I already do in my classroom.  While the terms have changed over the years (project-based learning, inquiry learning, understanding by design, backwards-designed lessons), I have always used this design of learning for my classroom.  That includes my e-classroom as well, where students have a central understanding that is the key for learning, by which all projects, activities, and scaffolded lessons hang off of.

My current class uses as its “Big Idea” the concept of understanding how SCORM-based lessons serve in the big picture of online learning instructional design.  Though the course focuses specifically on the learning of one SCORM-based tool, the steps of learning how to use the tool is merely the scaffolding to get to the central concept.

The second article, “Cybercoaching: Rubrics, Feedback, and Metacognition, Oh My!” by Naomi Jeffery Petersen, was much more important for me, because this is where I want to improve my online teaching.  It is not at the “design” stage of assessment.  Rather it is at the assessing stage of assessment.  While the article does mention how you can design assessments to be a part of the different stages in the learning process (I will adopt the term Harmonic Feedback Loop), it goes beyond that to show some of the actual assessing strategies in action.  The inline commenting and tracking feedback are important steps I need to incorporate into my class.

Another article not in the class that feeds into this discussion is an article by Marshall Goldsmith.  He coins the term feedforward, as opposed to feedback, and it reinforces the sense of the harmonic feedback loop as being a method to propel future action instead of critiquing past action.

Also this week, we developed pre-class surveys for our classes, to gather information about our participants that we would use to better our instruction.  Though I’ve created these for my courses before, I have not used the tool Survey Monkey to do so (I’ve used Survey Monkey for other purposes, though).  Survey Monkey has lost some of its capabilities, though, as you can no longer create custom urls and are limited in the amount of responses you can gather.  I still remain a fan of Google Docs because of the ease by which you can share the gathered data (in graphical form) with your class.

At any rate, here is my survey for the week.

As I reflect on this process, I have some mixed thoughts.  On the one hand, when it comes to the educational concept of instructional design, I very much like the activities so far.  They are sequenced and process-oriented, and they are doing a good job (for me at least) of keeping everything tied together.

On the other hand, I am realizing I was mistaken about the central intent of this course.  I had signed up thinking that this was not an instructional design course, but rather a course that helped students understand how to give in-class assessment, feedback, and evaluation.  That is not the case, as we have focused solely on looking at tools that can be used for assessment, and planning the design of assessments that are aligned with instruction (elements of instructional design).  I was looking for more about “This is how you assess student group work”, or “This is how you give feedback on student forum posts”.

I have included a link for the assessment taxonomy for this week, which is a word document.  Again, this link will only be available for those in our course.

For this task, I chose Exam Builder, which as you might guess, is an online testing program, where you can create simple select-response quizzes for students to take, and where the answers are automatically assessed for you.  There are quite a bit of features that go with the reporting and summary of the quizzes.

One specific strategy we looked at this week was concept mapping.  We hand hands-on practice with this, developing our own concept map using the Inspiration software (my project is below).  Though we didn’t discuss the resource in class, I found the research gathered by the Thinking Foundation on concept mapping intriguing.  They looked at the implemented use of concept mapping in several schools in the UK (and elsewhere), chronicling how the implementation occurred and the effectiveness of the implementation.

In summary, the thinking foundation saw concept mapping giving students access to higher thinking skill development across all the schools they worked with.  Implicit in several studies was that the use of thinking maps made assessment an easier process for teachers; they were able to see student ability to connect concepts together to know, in a formative matter, whether understanding exists or whether further instruction is needed.  The speed by which teachers and students alike could create concept maps make them a seamless assessment type.

The concept map below is a map of a future class of mine; I will be developing a 1-credit professional development class for e-learners on the use of a lesson-creation tool Lesson Builder, which create SCORM-compliant lessons with built in interactive assessments.  The map showcases the central objectives, lessons, activities, and assessments of the course (it is a rough draft).

In our readings for this week, we focused primarily on the experiences of teachers and how they have used blogs.  One things I’m on the look for are some specific uses of blogging and how assessment will be determined.  For example, in this course, students such as myself blog with reflections once a week, and other participants are to read the blogs, but most student-to-student interaction takes place in the discussion forums.  I’m curious to see some examples of classes that use peer-assessment in blogging effectively and arbitrarily.

For more from Richard and other classmates, you can check out our course wiki.

I agree that I am more learner-centered, as I’ve always tried to forgo a transmission model of learning, and instead use a creation model of learning.  This activity did an excellent job of highlighting the differences in a brief learning experience.  One difficulty this module runs into is that “learner-centered” and “teacher-centered” are poles on a continuum, and not every statement falls neatly at the poles.  The statement “assessment is used to monitor learning” is a prime example, as this is true in both scenarios.  The “learner-centered” classroom, like the “teacher-centered” classroom, uses assessment to see where, when, and the rate of learning occurring, and then uses them to make decisions.  What is also true, though, is the way the monitoring takes place is different.  In a “learner-centered” classroom, much of the assessment is done by peers and self.  That notwithstanding, this module does a good job of giving a picture of the differences between these 2 models.

So why did I take this course?  The subject matter is essential for me.  Whereas the design of content and instruction and even assessments is something I have grasped, the actual process of assessing students in an online distance-learning format is something I am still struggling with.  I do not want my classes to be simply a series of hoops to jump through, a giant checklist by which a student finishes and gets their grade and goes on their way.  I want it to be a place of learning, and I don’t feel that learning is taking place as effectively as it could.

So, we are off to a good start with week 1′s discussions and articles.  Perhaps we are a bit too much concentrating on the theory of assessment at this point, but that is to be expected.  And, it is interesting to see the different perspectives and backgrounds of the other participants as well!