2: Learning, Teaching and Assessment processes

Description

Part of my role entails delivering training sessions for lecturers and other members of staff. This is typically face-to-face, but can also be delivered online. Staff can also pop-in to a drop in where someone is able to answer their questions. The sessions I run are typically on the use of educational technologies supported at the university, so tend to be introductory and only cover the basics and a little bit of pedagogy though I can also offer more bespoke training if required, and also answer the general queries.

One of the training sessions I run is on moodle quizzes. This is quite a basic course, which I inherited from when someone left, but this covered alot of topics which tend to be difficult for lecturers such as tailoring each setting for your quiz. Also, moodle quizzes require you to go to the question bank in moodle to create the questions, and then create the quiz afterwards which can often confuse staff. I had revamped the session to make it more beginner friendly and to spend time in the room walking around answering questions and showing users what to do if they had problems.

As the moodle quiz session was initially run by someone else, I decided to use their plan initially. One thing I found when using their plan was that the lecturers and staff had more questions on how usable their quiz was for their students. This meant that the last part of the session on writing effective quiz questions didn’t get as much allocated time and was often rushed.

For the second time I ran the session, while planning, I split the two, to give more time for the lecturers to try out the different question types, try to create questions and then also create a quiz. Doing this meant staff would have a really good understanding of the basics of moodle quizzes and could then build on this in their own time or in a more bespoke session. Often times, lecturers did have more bespoke queries such as how to set-up randomized questions or create multiple sets of questions with a calculated question type. If this was the case, I sent personalised instructions with screenshots. Evidence for this can be found in the 2 documents titled Follow up from Training Session 4-3-20 (for the document) and follow up moodle quizzes section (for the email thread).

Finally, during Covid-19, I had to deliver the session online. Doing the session online and during Covid-19 meant other considerations for students had to be taken into account, so after the session, I had added a slide after looking at the university considerations for online assessment. This can be found in the evidence section in the Slides from Moodle Quizzes Training Session. In this session, I decided to remove the part on creating effective quiz questions, primarily because of time constraints.

Reflection

I’ve run this session twice, once in the training room and once online. Comparing the two, the session in the training room was easier to manage, as I could engage the level of understanding in the room easier, and users could follow along using the computers in the room. When the session was delivered online during Covid-19, users were at home and so I had to make the assumption that they were working off their laptop screens. This meant it was hard to follow for users. Working around this issue, I took a recording of the session and then distributed to the users, and that way, they could follow in their own time, however, I still feel the session would have been more effective in the training room. This was during the Covid-19 crises when everyone was working from home, and made me more considerate to some of the issues lecturers faced in the move to online teaching during.

Looking at the personalised instructions I sent, this was a query from an Economics lecturer who wanted to use the same formula, but with different values. Moodle’s calculated question type allows you to do this, however, there wasn’t much time during the session to go through this. We didn’t have a specific guidance page on this, which is why I created the step by step guides. I also added screenshots as a visual aid for the lecturer as this wasn’t in the training room.

I don’t know if splitting the two sessions was a good thing. While there is now more time for users to get to grips with the basics, learning the theory and writing questions that test the learners understanding is also important. I also think the users would be more engaged with the topic if they see an educational technology and then learn some related theory about it. Further experimentation on the timing will be required. The next session will be one and a half hours with a 10 minute break, with a 40-10-40 split. The first 40 minutes will cover the set-up and the second 40 minutes will cover the theory on writing effective quiz questions.The theory part of the session is still being developed.