Entries by Anouk Janssens-Bevernage

Many research papers describe the potential of e-portfolios as a course-specific assessment tool, but often fall short of proposing real-life ideas for making this a bit more exciting. The following is just one example of how, with simple additional instructions, we can achieve much more with an e-portfolio tool. How to kill quite few birds with one stone: promote collaboration, promote reflection and assess online course work, among others. This is not based on formal research, but just the sharing of practice derived from past observations.

 

It’s been a long break, I am afraid. The team is working flat out to meet a couple of deadlines, some deadlier than others. Meanwhile, I have a whole lot of thoughts I would like to share here, some of which I have been nurturing over the past couple of months. Here we go.

At the PCF4 Conference last year in November, we got into a bit of a debate with a gentleman who claimed that you can’t rate LMSs, that they all serve specific purposes. I think he got upset about our pro-Moodle stance I wish we could have taken this further, but the session was about to close. I strongly disagree  with him: there are definitively better LMSs than others and we should be able to rate them according to a set of criteria.

However, it’s the criteria that are being used that bother me.

 

Developing Open Educational Resources comes with additional instructional design challenges for our team, used to design courses as a whole. One of the resources for every course will be a model (Moodle) course page, a showcase for how we would offer the sequence of developed smaller (granular) resources. Although this means harder work, it makes more sense as we think 'context', 'authenticity', and 'activity', rather than 'content' and 'object'. But during our design brainstorms our two delivery models sometimes seem to clash: can a contextualised learning environment be delivered in the form of resources that are granular enough to serve the purpose of this project?

Let me kick-start my input into our team blog by sharing some thoughts about a topic that runs through my work like a continuous thread: designing online group work that is fun, inspiring and meaningful for the learners.