Final Blog

I felt that this course pushed me in several ways.  There were a lot of deadlines to keep up with, and posting on different days was difficult when others had not posted their initial discussion on time.  I think assignments 2, 3, and 4 were helpful but I’m not sure I will go through all of the steps, (like making the tables) before making every assessment.  I felt that some of the discussions were useful but on occasion it appeared that the comments were very repetitive and only made for the sake of earning all of the points.  I understand that they are necessary and that in a perfect world; students would openly and willingly discuss pertinent topics, but it is frustrating to have to sift through so many discussions to find useful information.  I also feel like the assignments would be less frustrating if they were all available from the beginning.  If I had known the format of the template, I could have written my questions in the correct format the first time.  I liked creating the assessment and uploading it into Respondus because I had never added feedback to my questions before.  That was the needed push for me to learn how. 

Initially when I learned that we would be blogging I assumed it would be about things we were interested in or just wanted to share.  It would have been nice if we could have used the blog or the journal feature to simply present ideas or new things we learned, instead of answering more discussion type questions.  It felt like double duty on the discussions.  Having the blogs more personal would allow us to still discuss (in the discussion forum) as well as to create that more personal environment that still seems to be lacking in distance education.  Many of us seem to be all taking the same classes together, in the same order.  I think it would encourage more of a sense of community.  Overall I enjoyed the class and signed up for Administration in LST in the Spring!  J

Respondus

I like using Respondus to build my exams and also using the LockDown Browser for students while taking the exam.  All of my courses were previously taught in a face-to-face classroom and the exams were given paper and pencil.  I easily re-formatted my Word documents into text files with the “*” before the correct answers and added feedback (an added bonus since there was not any feedback previously!).   I also like that I can continue to format my questions using bold, italics, or color, as well as adding images.  Although these formats are lost when converting to plain text format, they can be fixed once they are uploaded into Respondus.  As for building a new exam, I believe I would build it straight into Blackboard.  A copy with an answer key can then be saved in Respondus and also to your computer as a back-up.  

I believe Respondus is very useful to instructors as long as they are familiar with the program’s capabilities. 

Assessment Creation

When creating an assessment item, I found the easiest part to be creating the stem, and the hardest part to be creating incorrect leafs.  I could easily think of a topic I wanted to cover, put it in question form, but then had a difficult time coming up with options that were indeed wrong, without appearing to be “tricky” or misleading.  I also had to be very conscious not to give away too much information to the question in the stem itself.  For example, in one stem I intended to give a definition and have the learner choose the correct term.  In the definition of criterion-referenced I used the word criteria, which would easily give away the answer even to the most clueless of students.  I found it helpful to use the thesaurus in MS Word to help overcome this problem.

I did not need to need to modify my original objectives once I began creating questions.  I knew this was an option and considered doing so at times, but was able to design assessment items that matched all of my objectives. 

Below is an example of one of my best assessment items:

12.)  In education there are four references commonly used for interpreting the performance of learners.  Read the following example and identify the type of interpretation demonstrated.  In Miss Mary’s first grade class, all of the students are given a short quiz at the beginning of the year.  At the end of the year Miss Mary gives the students the quiz again.

                A.            Ability-referenced

                B.            Growth-referenced

                C.            Norm-referenced

                D.            Criterion-referenced

Correct Answer: B – Growth-referenced compared the learner’s performance to their prior performance.

Incorrect Answer: A – Ability-referenced interprets the learners’ performance in light of that individual’s maximum performance.

Incorrect Answer: C – Norm-referenced interpretation compares the learners’ performance to that of others.

Incorrect Answer: D – Criterion-referenced describes what the learner can and cannot do.

Performance Objective:  (Chapter 6) Given an example, correctly identify the type of interpretation demonstrated.