by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Learning might be the wicked problem in higher education. It’s inescapable. So when a headline like “Can Artificial Intelligence Make Grading Fairer and Faster?” is published in a leading ed-tech publication, people notice. The article was about a platform called Gradescope, whose tagline is “Grade Faster. Teach better.” […]
Read Moreabout Speed ∝ Quality ∝ Cost – Can Any Ed-Tech Idea Avoid the Iron Triangle?
by James Mixon, Department of History Ah, the multiple-choice quiz. An old stand-by for some instructors who love them not least because it can make grading so easy. For others, especially those in more narrative-intense disciplines like mine (history), they are problematic: names and dates and other “data” are only the beginning. What matters is […]
This post details the grading process described in “Scan and Deliver! Personalized Feedback in Large Classes.” We printed individual labels with each student’s name; on each label, the corresponding CWID was encoded in a Code 39 barcode. We used standard 1″ x 2 5/8″ addressing labels, 30 per page, for which MS Word has built-in templates. […]
Read Moreabout Details and Procedures: Returning Hand-Graded Exams Electronically
by Marco Bonizzoni and Diana Leung, Department of Chemistry Organic chemistry is a surprisingly visual discipline. Molecules, the fundamental entities of chemistry, exist as 3D objects whose shapes often profoundly influence their properties, so students must learn the visual language of the discipline, which attempts to convey the nature of these three-dimensional objects through two-dimensional drawings. […]
Read Moreabout Scan and Deliver! Personalized Feedback in Large Classes
by Michael J. Altman, Department of Religious Studies Games are fun. Quizzes are not. But games can make quizzes more fun. That’s what I have learned by experimenting with the Kahoot, an interactive learning game, in my REL 130: Religion, Politics, and Law course. I discovered Kahoot during the Teaching Professor Technology Conference a few […]
I am going to write about measuring teaching effectiveness. There is a lot of buzz about metrics in higher education media, but not until the mind-meld app is released for iOS will teachers know what their students are thinking. One of the challenges of teaching a large-enrollment course is to regularly determine the level of students’ learning. […]
Read Moreabout This Professor Likes CATs (classroom assessment techniques)
Final grades are due tomorrow! My colleague mentioned that eating cold cereal thrice daily was the norm over the weekend in order to minimize the time not spent writing comments on essays, verifying spreadsheet formulates, cross-checking assignments with rubrics, and all the other, sometimes mind-numbing tasks that arrive at the end of the term. And this is […]
Read Moreabout Be the Grader that You Wish to See in the World
In “Multiple Choices,” a post on the blog Practicum: Critical Theory, Religion, and Pedagogy, Russell McCutcheon ponders how multiple choice tests facilitate learning in large introductory courses: But what about the multiple choice tests? Well, like that definition assignment . . . it’s more about how they study for it and how they come to […]
by Alecia Chatham, Department of Modern Languages and Classics In my online courses, I often post short, weekly quizzes that are graded immediately by Blackboard. There are a few different quiz types that I use for certain things. Key concept quizzes sometimes take students a little more time to figure out on their own, though they may only […]
Types of Assessment Formative assessments Formative assessments informally measure a student’s understanding of a concept or concepts and thus have very low stakes or are not graded at all. Formative assessments are used to gauge the effectiveness of teaching, “check in” with students to make sure they are learning the course material, and to provide students with immediate, qualitative feedback. Formative assessments usually […]
