1a: An understanding of the constraints and benefits of different technology
Description
In my current role as Assistant Educational Technologist, I run training sessions on various educational technologies such as Moodle, Lecture Capture, Audience Response Systems and others. Given the complexity and flexibility of Moodle, training sessions for Moodle are broken up into various different areas. One of the training sessions I deliver focuses on Moodle Quizzes. One of the benefits of Moodle is reusable questions among different quizzes and exporting the whole question bank without taking the quiz with you. However, this can be tricky for staff to understand and often leads to staff re-using the questions year upon year, so many questions are old.
Focusing on creating the questions, there are many different types, which can be confusing for staff creating the quiz. These range in difficulty, and each have their own pros and cons. As there 10+ types of questions in Moodle, I decided to make a small double sided A4 handout highlighting the pros and cons of each different question type. Evidence for this can be found below in the evidence section.
In my previous role as a Lecturer Capture Reviewer, my daily task consisted of reviewing the previous days captures and finding any faults with recordings. This role also included communicating with lecturers and academic staff relating to the problems in their recordings and finding out what went wrong, be it AV issues in the room or a user error in the form of the wrong buttons being paused. I have attached email confirmation from my old manager in the evidence section.
Reflection
As the Lecture Capture Reviewer role followed from the events of the previous day, the end user wasn’t impacted hugely, as students tend to watch recordings some time after the recordings. Reviewing the recordings allowed me and the staff member to come up with a workaround if there was one (using a previous recording) and fix the fault in the room if needed (low voice, camera facing wrong way). This was an improvement from previous years, where staff would find out the recordings had errors quite late, and students hadn’t been able to view recordings, sometimes during revision periods.
This role also taught me about how different forms of errors can impact on the learning technology used by students. In the case of lecture capture, the 2 main causes of errors were human error (lecturers pausing the recording or stop buttons, not speaking loud enough, scheduling errors) or technical error (green screen issue, problem with the ECHO360 pods or room). These both had similar impact, with the end result in majority of cases resulting in parts of the the recording missing and previous years recording having been used.
While using the previous recordings was a good workaround, one limitation of it was that it consisted of a different cohort, who may have asked different questions. When setting up last years recordings for a lecturer, this is something I always mention. As a result of me doing this role, there are now more training sessions on the AV pods to reduce the amount of human error, and the lecture capture reviewer role has been expanded to a full time role, meaning that errors in recordings are found as early as possible.
Focusing on the Quiz Questions Quick Guide, I wanted to make what is a lot of information (10+ types of questions, each with its own pros and cons) into a nice simple page or two which staff can draw upon if needed. While quizzes allow for automatic marking and flexibility when it comes to space and time, each individual question type will have its own caveat. For example, some question types such as the essay question type and the short answer question will have to be manually graded. Another example is while the option to give feedback based on responses allows a lecturer to give tailored feedback into where the student has gone wrong, but also requires time with the lecturer manually marking the quiz.
Doing this task was useful, as it allowed me to think about the most important problems faced by staff, also forming part of my training session. For example, creating quiz questions in Moodle can be quite timely, and if the lecturer hasn’t heard of a certain question type, this would also take quite long. In doing this task, I learnt that it’s easy to promote activities (in this case, different types of quiz questions) as a learning technologist, but for academics, the combination of time, ease of use and the aims of the session/assessment are also a factor in the way they teach and assess.
Evidence
Quiz Questions Benefits & Drawbacks
Lecture Capture Reviewer Confirmation