Comments on: Translating Information-Dense Courses for E-delivery

By: phonesex

phonesex — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:00:35 +0000

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By: sidlausb

sidlausb — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:52:50 +0000

Okay, that helps clarify the purpose of the games for me. Once we’re finished with the core revision of FW315, I might be interested in finding some ways to incorporate some more of these active elements.

By: sidlausb

sidlausb — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:51:41 +0000

Thanks, that makes good sense.

By: Karen Watte

Karen Watte — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:08:57 +0000

Usually it is just an exercise — ungraded and repeatable so that they can use it to study as well.

By: Shannon Riggs

Shannon Riggs — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:29:35 +0000

More on games … The games Karen mentioned are typically not graded, but rather are offered as practice/learning opportunities. However, we can impress upon students that these practice activities will help them study for graded assessments. We can also create assignments to accompany the games, such as reflection pieces on what was learned.

In addition to the custom games our multimedia team can help create, we also have software called StudyMate, which can take simple questions typed in a Word document and turn them into crossword puzzles, fill in the blank, and Jeopardy-like trivia games. You can read more about them here: http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/ecampuspdt/2011/07/19/studymate-active-learning-games/

By: sidlausb

sidlausb — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:07:45 +0000

Hi Jen,

Thanks for the comment. I do find that I need to review some concepts for students. Interpreting phylogenies, for example, while theoretically covered in the 200-level biology series, is a constant source of confusion. I’ve ended up devoting an entire day of classtime to the topic in FW315 (on campus) in order to try to backfill misconceptions.

My bigger frustration is not that I need to review, but that I’m responsible for providing the basic framework that the students need to succeed in the courses that follow this one. That limits the amount of attention that I can pay to analysis and synthesis in FW315, and results in a lot of weight being given to comprehension-level assessments. That frustrates the more able students and also results in the high information density that I’m struggling with in the transition to the online format.

On the other hand, my follow-up class (Advanced Ichthyology) is weighted much more heavily toward higher-level reasoning, so if I ever translate that to eCampus I’ll perhaps be able to avoid this frustration.

By: Jen Gervais

Jen Gervais — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:49:39 +0000

Hi Bryan,

I face a lot of the same challenges with graduate population dynamics- can I assume mastery of the logistic equation, and a thorough understanding of the difference between continuous and discrete-time models? Probably not. One way I plan to try to deal with this is to create short review modules, which I hope will be enough to refresh students’ memories, and identify the students (at least to themselves) who need more foundational work. I was thinking of using jing or something similar (to force me to keep it short and sweet) to cover just ONE issue (R versus r versus lambda, perhaps). Students can review, or not. I love the idea of games in addition to that- maybe I can use a game to help figure out where my class is in terms of knowledge, and students who are realizing they’re rusty can refer to the supplementary info, either in jing format, or short interactive slide shows… Maybe reviewing how fish float would be similar?

I’ll be interested to hear how you work through the problem! We should continue to compare notes.

Jen

By: sidlausb

sidlausb — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:35:06 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion! Does one typically grade these games, or just leave them as optional exercises?

By: Karen Watte

Karen Watte — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:22:19 +0000

One idea for dealing with large amounts of knowledge-level type information is to incorporate games into a course. Ecampus supports several classes where students simply need to ‘learn a huge amount of information’. Our multimedia team has developed games that help students interact with that information in a variety of engaging ways — that hopefully help them learn and retain it better than traditional methods.