"Her plan? Turn over grading to the students in the course, and get out of the grading business herself... Her approach works based on contracts and 'crowdsourcing.'"
"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."
"3 ways that technology and learning technologists can assist faculty who would like to experiment as Professor Davidson [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/03/grading] has done with finding more authentic and effective ways to use grading to promote learning."
Analytics and Recommendations block uses charts and tables which are colour coded so students can quickly see they participation.
Students can see single analytics about their participation in the course. Teachers can see single, comparative analytics and global analytics (all students together) too.
Morover, the block shows recommendations for students about what activities they should work to improve their final grade. It shows too a estimate final grade according with a reference course.
Another case study of increasing teacher engagement with online teaching through a graded 'awards' system. Going for positive reinforcement rather than a compliance model while still suggesting that there should be a minimum standard.
"But how do we get students to realize what they themselves value? How do we get students to think about their blogging as something other than work for a grade?"
"Do you pass back exams, a set of papers or grades on some other student project and offer generic comments on what the class did and didn't do well on the assignment?"
"'The creation of video and the publishing of video is getting to the point where it's almost as easy as creating a written assignment,' says Kyle D. Bowen, Purdue University's director of informatics."s recent experience.
Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.