Year on year use of online assessment is nearly doubling here at the OU. In the last year around half a million quizzes were delivered to students in our virtual learning environment using a combination of the Moodle quiz engine and the University’s in-house OpenMark system. The use of the e-assessement tools for summative purposes […]
The Higher Education Funding Council for England has issued a document called Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology: A revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning. Naturally I was interested to see what they are recommending. Various other studies are quoted which demonstrate the benefits of elearning, and there are references to […]
I’ve just spent two days at the e-Assessment in Practice Conference at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham. I felt a bit out of it not being in military uniform or being followed around by a dog but it’s been a good opportunity to get back into the area of eassessment. Two of the presentations dealt […]
Sally Jordan gave a workshop today on how to use the Intelligent Assessment Technologies system we’ve got plugged into our VLE to develop short text response questions. One example she gave (I’ve reworded it slightly): A raindrop falls vertically with constant speed. What can you tell from this about the forces acting on the raindrop? […]
I’m at an event called Assessment for Open Learning in the Cotswolds for a couple of days. Two particularly interesting presentations this morning showed how online learning technologies are being used to develop collaborative and other skills, and how these are being assessed. Mark Endean discussed a postgraduate course on Team Engineering (T885) where students […]
Initial feedback on the new Moodle gradebook is promising. Tutors on the Open University course SDK125 “Introducing health sciences: a case study approach” reported: Gradebook seems very useful, as I now get to view a list of all of my students results, without having to go into each of their StudentHome pages. It was also […]
The prevailing wisdom from techie types you meet at elearning conferences and in the blogosphere seems to be that VLEs as large applications are unsustainable and that the future is a range of components built by different companies or projects which interact with each other over the Internet (or intranet) via web services as a […]
I’ve seen elearning projects fail many times over the years because they attempted to take static text designed for print, perhaps with a few graphics, put it on the web and expect students to engage in endless page-turning which they would have been better off doing from a book. It’s boring, the text takes longer […]