re:Learnings

Students of the world can blame Benjamin Wood for the Multiple choice test. You don’t have to search hard on the Twitterverse to see how impactful question design can be: [twitter_collection id=”992643547122745345″ height=”400″ dnt=”TRUE” chrome=”nofooter, noborders”] A well written multiple question will test knowledge and understanding. The question is – what is good design practice for creating a multiple choice question? The Basic Form Stem, distractors and key The classical form of a multiple choice is (1) question stem and (2) the options. The options are divided into distractors (incorrect answers) and key (the correct answer). The structure applies to various forms of multiple choice: Traditional Alternate Choice True/False Complex Multiple Choice (Not recommended as good practice) What is Good Question Design Practice? So what does the research (Brame, C., 2013, Costigan et al, 2004 and Haladyna et al, 2002) sa...

It’s a classic education professional buzz word that gets thrown about – but what does it really mean?  Can “ Constructive Alignment ” better help you answer that question from students “Is this going to be assessed?” When designing a course, if you are the subject matter expert, an Educational Developer will ask you to: Create about the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) Align both the “Teaching and Learning Activities” (TLA) and assessments each reflect the scope of ILOs. But why do they ask you to do that? It’s based on an approach developed by John Biggs in 1996 at Sydney University. The ‘Constructive’ part of the buzzword often gets overlooked. A Constructivist model of learning at its most basic theorises that people learn when they reflect on their experiences. The ‘Alignment’ is conceptual: the TLA (experience) and the Assessment (reflection) both reflect intended learning outcomes at the required depth of understanding (Biggs 1996). Required Depth...

My goodness! It actually worked.  Here’s a grab bag of thoughts about converting Canvas subjects to Moodle. 3 Phases of build: Admin – Base – Content When there are only a few of us on the project, or people change, or work only part time, dividing a subject’s development into three distinct phases really enable us to be flexible. Lots of Developers Having more than 4 people on the project allowed specialisation to emerge. It allowed both a content and a quiz point person to onboard new developers and to provide support. It also freed me to refine and develop processes and continue work on transitioning subject. MS Teams Universal acceptance of MS Teams as a method of organising the project for developers: files, comms and platforms. Development Server Having Moodle on a development server provide to be a great resource for: Trialling Moodle Plugins quickly and safely. Flexibility in process, e.g. export questions or make back-ups Spee...

Getting images into questions remains the last stumbling block. Solving the question import process was awesome but automatically importing images into those questions still remains the last unmet challenge. Images are either simply broken or have unwanted hard coded links back to the Canvas instance. Solution dead-ends For example, one Chemistry exam had 60 questions with 127 images. It’s pedagogically critical that not one is missed or incorrect. At least the Canvas export files provide the original image files – and even generates the images for LaTeX. Any solution had to be kept to existing tool base – scripting new tools was out of scope. So a limited amount of time was spent investigating tech-type tricks: Following tips like this: https://www.slideshare.net/tjuly/adding-images-to-moodle-quiz-and-import-via-xml Like Moodle Books, compress both the quiz xml and images together Uploading images to the course and trying to create links Creating image in on...