So far, it's been a very full week of in-person collaborative work for me on campus -- and I'm also mindful that my out-of-the-country conference travel starts at the end of next week, and I still have research and writing to do before I go! Suffice it to say I've been feeling pressured.... So I've needed to approach OL101 a bit more sporadically this week, rather than giving it significant amounts of my "prime time" as I did in weeks 1 and 2. That said, I think I've done reasonably well at completing all the various tasks in this module.
What I have not done is something I really admire in a fellow participant's course site -- I won't name her here for privacy reasons, but she coordinates internships for a certain urban-studies program.... In that person's sample course, it looks to me like she's been able to really use OL101 not only to learn processes but also to organize and present real-life material in very helpful, usable ways. By contrast, because the course I will be designing for online instruction is one I have not taught before (and whose organization I have not yet fully worked out -- that's a task for later this summer and fall), I've used the OL 101 experience more to prove (to myself, and I hope to the director of online learning) that I can figure out and make use of the various tools on offer. The actual items I've placed in the course are admittedly "place-holders."
By my accounting, though, I think I'm nearly "done" with OL 101. (I'm still waiting for some other participants' quizzes to appear so that I can take them.) What's next for me? I think that, prior to designing the online course to be proposed for offering next summer, I will be devoting some attention to learning more about the Moodle gradebook features. You see, this fall I will have a course with +/- 70 students, meeting on a MWF 50-minute schedule. I would like to be proficient enough in the grading features of Moodle that I can do all the course assessment through Moodle -- no passing of papers back and forth in class. For that, I will need to:
1) become more comfortable navigating the gradebook features (which even our fearless leader calls "clunky"!),
2) find out some answers to the question I posted on my discussion forum in the shared OL101 course about grade-input format options (I do not assign grades on a numerical-scores-and-points basis, but input letter grades directly, with relative weights assigned; while I have found that there are Excel-based workbooks that will do this very simply for me, I have not found out how to do it in Moodle. Help!), and
3) learn about the "unzip/zip/distribute" mass-file management features in the gradebook that I've heard other colleagues talk about. Responding more or less efficiently to 70 essays might just be possible if, instead of being tied to one-by-one online responses, I could compose all the responses offline and have them automatically uploaded to the right destinations. Again, help and advice are most welcome.
