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First attempts at designing self-paced e-Learning courses are fraught with failure

Begin by evaluating the knowledge and skills of your design team

Nine Events of Instruction

Ds can think of “Modeling” as “show me” and “Guided Practice” as “let me try.” “Independent practice” might be used for a case study that ties together practice for multiple objectives.

Purpose — Why is it important?

What information do learners need to complete objective?

Keller’s ARCS model of motivation

two basic elements to a scoring rubric

the vital “traits,” key qualities, or “dimensions,” to be rated

“rating scale.

best of both worlds here, by designing a rubric on a PC that allows for the easy insertion of assignment specific traits.

longer scales make it harder to get agreement among scorers

extremely short scales make it difficult to identify small differences between students.

Analytical or holistic

A holistic rubric is more efficient and the best choice when criteria overlap and cannot be adequately separated

analytical rubric, however, will yield more detailed information about student performance and, therefore, will provide the student with more specific feedback.

document, “Best Practices in Student Outcomes Assessment.”

If you visit the web page I cut and pasted this from, you will find that each item is hyperlinked to a full explanation of the step.

Clearly defining the purpose of assessment and what you want to assess is the first step in developing a quality rubric

second step is deciding who your audience is going to be.

. Chicago Public Schools web-site

Barbara Moskal, in her article “Scoring Rubrics: What, When, and How?” insists that rubrics should be non-judgmental: “Each score category should be defined using description of the work rather than judgments about the work.

advocates of rubrics at all educational levels have argued that rubrics provide students with clear and specific qualities to strive for in those assignments that “are open-ended, aligned more closely to real-life learning situations and the nature of learning” (Skillings and Ferrell) and mitagate both teacher bias and the perception of teacher bias (Mathews).

static elements encouraging students to simply make sure their essays have those features

if you feel that one dimension is more important than another.

Look at some actual examples of student work to see if you have omitted any important dimensions.

the rubrics their institution developed can be used to reliably score the performance-based and problem-solving assignments that now form a significant part of the undergraduate engineering curriculum at the University of California at Berkley.

When instructors plan on grading student thinking and not just student knowledge, they should articulate the vital features that they are looking for and make these features known to the student.

both assess and encourage student learning

the criteria must be made clear to them and the jargon used must not only be understandable to the student but also be linked specifically to classroom instruction

prescriptive rather than descriptive

Pilot test your rubric or checklist on actual samples of student work

“The instructor’s comments on papers and tests are done after rather than before the writing, so they cannot serve as guidelines, compromising the value of writing comments at all.”

When students are full partners in the assessment process, as Mary Jo Skillings and Robin Ferrel illustrate in their study on student-generated rubrics, they tend to “think more deeply about their learning.”

Moreover, some teachers have noticed how students who were good writers become wooden when writing under the influence of a rubric.

Both types of rubrics benefit the teacher and the student in varying degrees:

Moreover, some teachers have noticed how students who were good writers become wooden when writing under the influence of a rubric. Dona Patrick, an elementary school teacher noticed that while her sixth grade students did well on their state writing test, those students who had been natural writers, those students who had “stylistic voices full of humor and surprises, produced less interesting essays when they followed the rules [as outlined in a rubric]” (Mathews).

Rubrics can be designed to measure either product or process or both; and, they can be designed with dimensions describing the different levels of that “deep learning” so valued in WAC programs.

cross the board; meanwhile, the teacher that uses specific rubrics is always composing new descriptions of quality work, but their students have cle

Consequentially, when rubrics are published in the classroom, students striving to achieve the descriptions at the higher end of the scale in effect guide their own learning. We must keep in mind, however, that other aspects of good pedagogical practice play into student success: rubrics that are outside of the students “zone of proximal development” are useless to the students.

Usually a numerical value is assigned to each point on a scale. You can weight dimensions differently if you feel that one dimension is more important than another. There are two ways in which you can express this value judgment: 1. You may give a dimension more weight by multiplying the point by a number greater than one. For example, if you have four dimensions (content, organization, support, conventions) each rated on a six-point scale, and you wish to emphasis the importance of adequate support, you could multiply the support score by two. 2. You may devise scales of unequal length, which would mean that the shorter scales would count less than the longer ones. For example, organization, support, and content could each be rated on separate 6 point scales, while punctuation and / or spelling could be rated on separate 3 point scales. A paper that was well organized and punctuated would yield 6 for organization and 3 for punctuation. A paper that was perfectly punctuated but poorly organized might yield a 3-3 score.

Or you can build your own rubric from scratch—convert existing revision or discovery heuristics into rubrics; convert comments that used to show up on A, B, C, D, and F papers into descriptive phrases, or start completely anew. The Chicago Public Schools web-site offers simple guidelines to follow when designing your own rubric. If you visit the web page I cut and pasted this from, you will find that each item is hyperlinked to a full explanation of the step.

Clearly defining the purpose of assessment and what you want to assess is the first step in developing a quality rubric. The second step is deciding who your audience is going to be. If the rubric is primarily used for instruction and will be shared with your students, then it should be non-judgemental, free of educational jargon, and reflect the critical vocabulary that you use in your classroom.

well-designed rubrics help instructors in all disciplines meaningfully assess the outcomes of the more complicated assignments that are the basis of the problem-solving, inquiry-based, student-centered pedagogy replacing the traditional lecture-based, teacher-centered approach in tertiary education.

they should articulate the vital features that they are looking for and make these features known to the student

The result is many students struggle blindly, especially non-traditional, unsuccessful, or under-prepared students, who tend to miss many of the implied expectations of a college instructor, expectations that better prepared, traditional students readily internalize.

rubrics, in effect, dehumanize the act of writing. According to Thomas Newkirk, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire, “rubrics promote ‘mechanical instruction in writing’ that bypasses ‘the human act of composing and the human gesture of response’” (Mathews).

if we have assigned ourselves the task of getting a good rubric to use, we need a rubric to judge our performance—that is, we need a meta-rubric to assess our rubric.

When instructors do not explicitly delineate the qualities of thought that they are looking for while grading, they reduce learning to a hit or miss endeavor, where “assessment remains an isolated […] activity and the success of the learner is mostly incidental” (Montgomery).

When instructors do not explicitly delineate the qualities of thought that they are looking for while grading, they reduce learning to a hit or miss endeavor, where “assessment remains an isolated […] activity and the success of the learner is mostly incidental” (Montgomery).

When instructors do not explicitly delineate the qualities of thought that they are looking for while grading, they reduce learning to a hit or miss endeavor, where “assessment remains an isolated […] activity and the success of the learner is mostly incidental” (Montgomery). T

Moreover, some teachers have noticed how students who were good writers become wooden when writing under the influence of a rubric.

A rubric with two or more separate scales is called an analytical rubric, as it takes apart or breaks up the rating system for each trait; a rubric that uses only a single scale is called a holistic rubric. A holistic rubric is more efficient and the best choice when criteria overlap and cannot be adequately separated; an analytical rubric, however, will yield more detailed information about student performance and, therefore, will provide the student with more specific feedback.

A rubric with two or more separate scales is called an analytical rubric, as it takes apart or breaks up the rating system for each trait; a rubric that uses only a single scale is called a holistic rubric. A holistic rubric is more efficient and the best choice when criteria overlap and cannot be adequately separated; an analytical rubric, however, will yield more detailed information about student performance and, therefore, will provide the student with more specific feedback.

The issue of weighting may be another area in which you can enlist the help of students. At the beginning of the process, you could ask a student to select to select which aspect she values the most in her writing and weight that aspect when you assess her paper.

While many educators make a compelling argument for sharing rubrics with students, others worry that doing so will encourage formulaic writing. That “rubric” is listed in most thesauruses as a synonym for “formula” does nothing to dismantle such fears. Well-designed rubrics, though, should not do this; unfortunately, most state issued rubrics used in secondary school standardized testing are poorly designed rubrics that list specific static elements encouraging students to simply make sure their essays have those features.

“voice of the instructor” (all the little things we say and do when standing in front of a class) is missing. The graduate students’ learning products are not just mere “page turners,” they are lacking both in interactivity to hold the learner’s interest

Objectives — there is little difference between the delivery methods.

Our learners want to jump in and take just the training they want and need to perform a task.

Once the appropriate stakeholders approve the IDP, instructional designers start the storyboarding process. Designers (or their managers) often expect to move effortlessly between creating an IDP and developing storyboards from it.

Another convention in the example requires informing the learner of the approximate time it takes it complete the instruction.

Like any design documents, you will need to provide your instructional designers with clear instructions on how to prepare lesson plans and give them appropriate examples.

try to highlight the main point of each bullet point. Try to bold only the key parts of each point — limit it to as few words as possible.

I often use images of people in my slides, as photography of people tends to help the audience connect with the slide on a more emotional level.

People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds.

Remember the golden rule of PowerPoint presentations — always do what is right for your audience.

It’s okay to cover details verbally that are not reflected in your bullet points.

convert each bullet point into a separate image

Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information

So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? Does that blue swoosh add meaning? If not, leave it off

If they fall below 24 pt then you might be on to something. Also, look at the number of lines you use for your bullet points. If you use more than two lines anywhere, then they’re definitely leaning text heavy.

Follow these steps to reduce and simplify your text-heavy bullet points

Instead of a copy of your PowerPoint slides, it is far better to prepare a written document which highlights your content from the presentation and expands on that content.

Use high-quality graphics including photographs.

Your slides should have plenty of “white space” or “negative space.”

Best if you limit the bars to 4-8.

You can achieve this through consistent type styles, color, image treatment, and element placement throughout the slide deck

relevant

Now the software background template can be seen just enough to become a bit of noise

Have a visual theme, but avoid using PowerPoint templates

mage is lame & has nothing to do with content

Presentation software gives us many shiny, seductive elements to work with