I returned from Savannah, GA this week. I was attending the ITC e-Learning Conference. Both the conference and Savannah were fantastic. This topic seemed to recur in many sessions. And in many sessions presenters were quick to point to statistics that learners are not very appreciative of peer-to-peer collaborative assignments. Other stats seem to show that a majority of online students claim community is not very important to their learning.
I think these stats are mis-guided. I am not doubting that learners dislike being forced onto discussion boards and pushed into groups to produce reports. I am not doubting learners find these activities more wasteful than educational. I am quickly annoyed in courses I have taken with the post once, respond twice routine. This is forced conversation! Do you ever take the time in your F2F class to ask everyone for their answer and respond to two student answers? No, there isn't time for one, and more importantly the idea that everyone's voice is necessary on any given topic is a bit mis-guided.
So, pay no attention to claims that students do not like community. Instead focus your attention on how to better create thought provoking prompts for learners. And allow community to form more naturally. Remove the classroom picture from your head! The online structure is different.
*steps down from soapbox*
2.17.2006
2.08.2006
Learn Sth New
An instructor asked me today how to allow students to see results of only certain quizzes in WebCT while not giving them access to the entire list of Quizzes they have yet to take. I replied I didn't really think it was possible as any quiz tool will lead to the same page housing ALL quizzes.But then I was curious so I poked around on Ask Dr. C and found a javascript hack that loads specific quiz results... pretty slick, but not very user friendly (see script below).
I figured my search was over, but when I thought about it I realized I never had any reason in my courses to even try to add more than one quiz tool. So I wanted to see what it would do. It did just what I thought it would do. Created two quiz tool icons pointing to the same quiz listing page. But here is where it got interesting. I noticed a little field I had not seen before. It's in the picture above. That little Quiz listing section. The Select button let's the designer choose which quizzes or surveys to display on the linked quiz page. How cool is that!? Why didn't I know about this sooner?
Here is the javascript hack if you need it (replace the "course_id" and "quiz_#" and note that a return was added to make it fit on screen):
<html>
<script type="text/javascript">
self.location="/SCRIPT/course_id/scripts/
student/serve_quiz_marked.pl?DO_GRADE+
quiz_#+1+VIEW";
</script>
</html>
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