I'm teaching a blended adult accelerated (5 week) course. Just started last monday - which was the last time we meet as a class face-to-face. The rest of the course will be completed online. Angel is our LMS of choice at the College and so that's our launch pad and organizing utility. That much was obvious. What was not obvious was how to re-organize and re-structure my activities for the online portion of the course. Which is a little funny since it's kind of my job to help other instructors re-discover their own materials in the light of an online delivery format.
I typically stress the importance of thinking in terms of activities - final projects and working backwards to include the building blocks that will help students achieve these goals (I know the word is scaffolding, but I'm weary of this term as it applies to education). So I did that. No problems there really... I'm sure I could probably provide more blocks for some... but they can ask for them.
Where I then struggled was a point system. I had all these activities leading to various goals and no point scheme. And then a late policy needed to be crafted that would encourage completion of these activities. I thought about dividing the 15 or so assignments into 100 points so that the more difficult assignments were 10-20 points while the easier assignments were less. And then the usual late policy of 10% deduction per day - up to 3 days or something like that. Boring. I've done that before. Late work is still all too normal and I want to encourage early work - especially on discussions.
As this only just started, I have no idea how it may play out and I have no control group, so this won't be a true study. But here is what I came up with. I'm starting everyone out at 100%. For each assignment, there are chances to gain bonus points as well as incur losses. Points are lost if directions are not followed or performance does not meet expectations of the assignment. Points are gained for early submissions (particularly on discussion forums) and for going beyond the expectations of the assignment. As for late policy, a -2 point deduction occurs on any late submissions and submissions can be up to 24 hours late. Beyond that, the assignment is not accepted and a -10 point deduction is recorded. That might seem harsh, but there are plenty of opportunities to gain bonus points for other assignments.
So far, and it's still early, I do not see much early posting going on in the discussions. Perhaps my bonus is not high enough. Perhaps these students (who all have other jobs), have other higher priorities than this class. But the submissions received have been great. And over half of the students chose to answer a bonus question on a reflection writing assignment. It's interesting at this point.
The gradebook is a bit of a challenge. I created an assignment and gave everyone 100 points/percent. Then I created individual extra credit assignments to hold the point loss/gain for each assignment. Angel seems to support negative points just fine, so this is working quite well. When I look at the gradebook, I can only see net performance on individual assignments, so I am thinking I will need to keep track of losses and gains in another spreadsheet. I sound like an accountant. Yikes. I could have split it out and done a column for loss and gain per assignment, but that seemed ugly. I do wish there was a way to show labels to students instead of points, so I could show something other than zero when they break even or meet the expectations.
So there is the new scheme. I'll post again mid-way through on any thoughts and then again at the end with some stats on early vs late vs non-submissions as well as how many bonuses were achieved through additional time and energy with the material and experiences.
