In attendance: Janell Pierce, Terri Martinez, Jennifer Waters, Beth Alsen, Peggy Johnson, and Shelley Rodrigo.
RUBRICS/GRADING FORMS
MCC's Beth Alsen (faculty in Educational Studies department) has created a marvelous array of rubrics for the online education class she teaches. Beth's rubrics include one for Discussion posts, reading summaries, autobiographies, creating a Powerpoint presentation, definitions, etc. The discussion grading form (rubric) is visible to the student when they are posting to the Discussion board, so they are reminded of the criteria on which they will be evaluated.
These rubrics are easily created within WebCT by using the Grading Forms tool available under the Teach tab.
Students know exactly what criteria they are being graded on for each assignment. For example, in Beth's grading form for the autobiography her students write, the are evaluated on their ideas, word choice, organization, and use of conventions (proper grammar, sentence structure, etc.)
When the instructor creates an assignment, he/she checks the box to "grade by grading form". Assuming the grading form has already been created, he/she browses to the appropriate form for that particular assignment.
The grading form is then visible when the instructor grades the student's submission. The instructor merely checks the appropriate radio button that applies to the student's effort for each criteria.
The grade is posted into the Gradebook automatically. The student can see exactly how many points they earned for each criteria, as well as any comments the instructor chose to include.
Beth is willing to share the rubrics she has created and offers them up to faculty to use as is or edit as desired. There are two ways you can access Beth's grading forms.
1. You can request to create a WebCT development course. Choose the mc_gradebook for your template from the pull-down menu at https://sso.mc.maricopa.edu/apps/mymcc/Webct.jsp
When you are in your course, click on the Teach tab and select Grading Forms from the tools on the left side of the screen.
2. Alternatively you can click on these links to see representative rubrics from Beth:
Shelley also recommends rubistar as a web site for those who don't want to create a rubric from scratch: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php
Beth had a lot of other creative features in her online class. Faculty are going to use their guest account to view them in more detail. For example, her timeline was very useful. Although the timeline was created in Flash and is quite time-consuming to duplicate, Shelley recommends these sites for creating your own timelines:
* http://dandelife.com/
* http://www.ourstory.com/
* http://www.xtimeline.com/index.aspx
ANIMOTO
Shelley introduced faculty to Animoto. This free software lets students (and instructors) create free short music videos with 12 to 20 of their own images.
The software has a lot of music to choose from so copyright need not be a concern. It students don't want to use their own photos, images can be copied from creative commons sites like Flickr as long as attribution of source is provided. Also look at creative commons: http://creativecommons.org/
The software automatically makes the transitions as the pictures show on screen as you hear the music. This would make a fun way for students to create their introduction to an online class. These videos can be linked to a discussion posting within WebCT. Simply copy the embed code that Animoto provides with your video, paste the code into a Discussion box, check the "Use HTML" option, and everyone in the class can access this original video. Shelley graciously created this video that shows you how to
video to embed animoto video in webct discussion board: http://www.screencast.com/users/rrodrigo/folders/Jing/media/bf258c44-1760-471e-b4f1-8b6db5569c7chttp://www.screencast.com/users/rrodrigo/folders/Jing/media/bf258c44-1760-471e-b4f1-8b6db5569c7c
You can post the videos you create in Animoto to YouTube if you like.
GOOD RESOURCE
If you are looking for other interesting ideas for your online course, check out this resource: http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~johnson/DLMGRSRC.HTM