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Activity Locking is an external module which sets up conditions that a student must reach before they can start(unlock) a Moodle activity. These criterion generally include time spent, score or completed. The conditions can be applied to more than one activity or resource for a each lock.

Mr. Thrun sent the 23,000 students who completed the Artificial Intelligence course a PDF file (suitable for framing) by e-mail showing their percentile score, but not the Stanford name; 248 students, none from Stanford, earned grades of 100 percent.

video lectures, which she creates along with corresponding fill-in-the-blank notes, as one of the keys to her success

They must achieve a score of 75 percent or higher, a technique that ensures students have mastered the topic area, before they can move onto the next level to cover new material.

Dyslexia does not resolve over time.  Longitudinal studies indicate that dyslexia is a persistent, chronic condition; it does not represent a transient "developmental lag.”    The  image on the left shows the  trajectory of reading skills over time in good and poor readers. The vertical axis on the left is the reading achievement score

Dyslexia reflects a very specific difficulty with reading and has nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, understanding ideas and concepts are often at a very high level in dyslexia as are other higher-level reasoning skills. Dyslexia is a localized problem, one involving the sounds, and not the meaning, of spoken language. Consideration of the differences between spoken and written language provides a helpful understanding of why some bright children struggle to read.

In dyslexic readers, converging evidence from many laboratories around the world has demonstrated “a neural signature for dyslexia,” that is, a disruption of the two neural systems in the back of the brain observed during reading (shown in the image below).

negotiable contracting and his research shows that students who are given a role in the assessment process and provided with the appropriate direction by their teachers are able to accurately evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and better pinpoint areas where they need to focus their efforts for improvement

develop a clearer picture of the task and their teacher's expectations while the teachers reported that they had clearer instructional goals

As a result, students typically perform at higher levels and gradually come to view assessment not as an arbitrary form of reward or humiliation, but rather as a positive tool for educational enrichment and growth.

Michael Sweet (1999), “The real value of the process [student evaluation] lies in the rationale behind the number.”

Online collaboration tools While Skype and other real-time collaboration tools make it easier for dispersed students to “get together,” Mandernach cautions against overusing synchronous tools. Instead, she says, you should encourage your students to take advantage of the many asynchronous collaborative tools inside your course management system or some of the new Web 2.0 tools. Some of her favorite Web 2.0 tools include: Tokbox, VoiceThread, Creately, Google Docs, and Teambox. These tools are relatively easy to use and help build a sense of community in the online classroom. They’re also another way to get students to buy into group work activities and using them makes the students more marketable upon graduation. “If you can use the collaborative environment to really bring them into your classroom and get connected to you and connected to their peers you’re going to see a lot of benefits besides increased test scores,” Mandernach says. “Many employers and graduate schools really view online learning as learning in isolation, and I think it’s important for students to show that they are capable of collaborative work — that they can work independently and with others.”

In the recent online seminar Online Group Work: Making It Meaningful and Manageable, Mandernach provided tips for adapting proven face-to-face group work strategies to the online environment. The key is to design tasks that are truly collaborative, meaning the students will benefit more from doing the activity as a group than doing it alone. Effective online group activities often fall into one of three categories: There’s no right answer, such as debates, or research on controversial issues. There are multiple perspectives, such as analyzing current events, cultural comparisons, or case studies. There are too many resources for one person to evaluate, so a jigsaw puzzle approach is needed with each student responsible for one part.

measurable criteria that can be counted or marked as present or not present in the work that is being evaluated. 

This allows the rubric to be used as an ongoing dialog between the teacher and student and allows the student to know when each criterion has been met and then make improvements as needed. (Lockett, 2001)

Although allowing student involvement in creating rubrics is time consuming, by allowing students a voice in creating their own rubric, the students have more ownership over their own learning and evaluation.