The Living Schoolbook - SyrCLE news

Interaction Style 1: Graded/Rated Assignments

Sean Keesler — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:40:33 -0400

Assignment data flow IF a system was distributed, allowing students to truly own their data

This data flow diagram illustrates the how students and teachers would interact in a distributed LMS to carry out the traditional graded assignment workflow.

A frequent use of courseware is to assign work to students, collect that work from students, assess the work and release the grades to students. In most courseware systems, this is all done in one tool. The Assignment tool (or the assignment and gradebook tools) "live" in a course. The design of courseware is mainly to facilitate the instructor's ability to manage the course.

An alternative approach would be to distribute the various transactions between two systems, the courseware system and a learner centered platform. Each set of tools would be designed and configured with the primary user's interest in mind.

The student would receive a message in their "inbox" with the assignment instructions, learning outcomes and rubric for the assignment.

The student would then do the work, saving their "drafts" in their own system and eventually sending back a response to the assignment with their work attached. Note that a copy is sent to the instructor, with the original content still on the student system.

The teacher would receive the student work in her "inbox" and (assuming that there is to be no formative feedback) evaluate the work against the rubric and releasethe grades back to all of the students.

There is a lot of duplicated data in a system like this which may end up causing issues for storage. However, this does allow each learner to retain a record of all of the assignments, work and assessment data that occurred in their classes...forever if they wish to. Similarly, this frees the institution from maintaining the course indefinitely "just in case" students need access to their data.

An important assumption is that a system that can engage in this sort of messaging becomes standardized, allowing students to remix and reuse their content in multiple classes at multiple institutions.

Goal Aware Data Point Tool

Sean Keesler — Wed, 6 Sep 2006 10:51:07 -0400

The Data Point tool is a very "low risk" way to introduce faculty to student performce data around the "Goal" concept. Many of our own faculty will be reluctant to involve their students in courseware, Sakai or anything that they have not had some experience with. The Data Point tool does not require ANY student interaction.

The Data Point tool allows a user with appropriate permissions to establish one or more Data Points in a worksite. The site maintainer will be able to link that Data Point to one or more Goals from associated worksites. Up to this point the workflow is very much analogous to the Goal Aware Assignment tool.

Screenshot of the Student Submissions page of the Goal Aware Data Point tool in Sakai

However, in the Data Point tool students will no be handing in anything. This may be useful for a wide range of applications such as:

observations of students in the field (for us, that may be field placements during student teaching)
paper based assignments
ratings of discussion participation
work turned in other systems
summative assessments

By specifying a role or set of roles that need to be rated, the tool automatically creates the appropriate placeholders for those users. The instructor can then rate each student's performance in the same manner as in the Goal Aware Assignment tool.

The Data Point tool is bundled with the 0.6 release of the Sakai Goal Management contrib module. Additional documentation of Goal Aware tools are available on the Sakai wiki.

SyrCLE is ready for the first day of classes in the School of Education

Sean Keesler — Fri, 1 Sep 2006 09:01:51 -0400

SyrCLE - the Syracuse Collaborative Leaning Environment is the School of Education's implementation of Sakai and the Open Source Portfolio toolset. It is ready for use by faculty, program coordinator's and students. Faculty interested in using these new tools should contact the Living SchoolBook by email (help@lsb.syr.edu) or by phone (443-3450) to establish an account and receive training.