Monthly Archives: April 2014

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The Art of the Discussion Prompt

Discussions are sometimes called the engine of an online course. Discussions provide an opportunity for students to engage with the course content, with each other, and with you—the professor—simultaneously, which means they have a lot of potential for meaningful learning and high retention.

There is no guarantee that students will really apply themselves by just creating a discussion. What you get out of a discussion assignment depends on what you put into it. Here are some tips for writing your discussion prompt, selecting your settings, and participating in the discussion.

Identify why this assignment is a discussion

Step one is to identify your goals for this assignment and your reasons for making it a discussion assignment. Do you want students to see the diverse perspectives of their classmates on the content? Do you want students to debate contrasting viewpoints? Do you want students to give feedback to each other as they apply the course content? How exactly do you want them to engage with each other? Continue reading →

Final Exams: Drawing and D2L

Executive Summary

Denise Nacu created a pair of multimodal midterm and final exams for her Human-Computer Interaction classes, but the time it took to grade them caused stress for her and her students.

Putting Denise’s exams online was difficult because parts of them required students to physically draw on the exam. We shifted the exams into two-part asynchronous, online-only formats with a D2L quiz for the multiple-choice and short-answer questions, and D2L dropbox with release conditions for submitting the design questions.

This solution saved Denise hours of grading and allowed her to return all final grades to her students within 48 hours of the last student completing their exam—a win for all involved.

Introduction

This post describes how Denise and I moved her midterm and final exams online using Desire2Learn. We’ll cover what the exams looked like at first, how we adjusted the format to a fully online format, and what we learned in the process. Continue reading →

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Can Project Management Achieve a Zen-like State?

“Huh?” you ask?  The typical project management state of mind is angst-ridden and chaotic.  There are too many projects with too many tasks and too many people to manage.  Then there is the inventory and handling of the content in order to check-off completed tasks to complete the projects.  And so it goes, until the mind becomes a tangled mess that brings on the dire need for a cup of coffee and a candy bar.

Three weeks before the beginning of a new quarter became the trigger point for inducing this project management panicked state of mind.  The bits of content and emails started rolling in which prompted growing task lists, phone calls, and meetings with my production assistant.  We couldn’t seem to get the information contained in any organized way where we felt in control.  We also found that in this morass of information, we were making mistakes.

Then along came Asana.   Asana is a cloud-based project management tool whose tag line is “Teamwork without email. Asana puts conversations and tasks together so you can get more done with less effort.”  YES!  Continue reading →