Prior to Semester
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In Blackboard (Bb) setup a test (http://ondemand.blackboard.com/r91/movies/bb91_tests_surveys_creating_test.htm)
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In the Welcome page to the test, to motivate and encourage students to participate; here is an example of a welcome:
“Welcome to this quest, we aim here to slay a few myths about the course and to help you be ready for the challenges it offers. This quest is casual and ungraded but still significant. It consists of simple to answer questions that will test your readiness. Getting an answer wrong does not fail you; rather it helps you find out what you will need to do to succeed. You can complete this quest as many times as you want to. You may use any useful resource to find the answers - course material, classmates, myRMIT or Google for example. If you like, you can challenge your friends to compete with you on the quest. Additionally,you can set a time limit when you challenge your friends.”
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Select Hide Results for this Test in the Grade Centre calculations. However, some indication of numbers of students that have taken the challenge would be useful - perhaps post these as a percentage at the top of your course
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Set simple multiple choice questions. Limit the quiz to 12-16 questions so it does not become too onerous.
Example of questions to check study readiness:
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Have you acquired the course text?
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Have you read the course outline?
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Do you know where lectures will be held?
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Do you know where tutorials will be held?
Example of questions to check whether students have read the course outline:
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Please enter the number of credits for this course
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What is the email address of your lecturer?
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Where are other course staff contact details to be found?
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How many self-directed hours are you expected to work?
Mix in one or two social questions to show your interest in the students’ well-being and study life. For example:
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Share the results of the students’ answers through a course announcement in a word cloud, as a graph or as a top 5 list
This is a simple community management technique to encourage social cohesion. The answers are automatically marked by Blackboard with appropriate feedback. This could be useful when correcting any student misconceptions.
In the Orientation Class
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Set up the instruction page to reflect the social and game elements of the quiz. Encourage students to form pairs or larger groups to encourage early socialisation and a sense of community. In some cultures a competitive element might be motivational but the key challenge is one for individuals
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Set up the quiz as “open book”, add this to the Instruction page along with any other details of time and number of questions
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Explain that this is a self-help activity and is in line with your expectations for student behaviour - they must take the responsibility for learning themselves
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Ask students to open the Bb page and with a partner complete the formative assessment and compare their answers
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Once the course has started you may close the quiz and review the data. At this stage you may be able to identify students who seem unprepared. You may also wish to email students who did not take the quiz to check if they feel sufficiently prepared for the course. The number of attempts students make on the quiz may also be significant data you can use to assess readiness.
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Include completion statistics for this activity via the class announcement. This can increase peer motivation to complete the quiz. It could form part of a larger gamification activity, e.g. the Gamification: Mobile Reading Challenge mini pattern.
EXTENSION
You can add questions that are a type of pre-test of the subject material, although in this case, it is important that you stress to the students that the purpose of the quiz is not a summative assessment; but is simply a formative assessment to indicate the level of existing student knowledge, which will help you fine-tune the lectures and tutorials.
Another activity is to ask students, by using Google docs, to prepare a document with two columns with concepts and definitions that were used in earlier lectures.
Another approach is to provide the concepts and ask students to:
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Check out the Wikipedia definition of the concepts and give the definition in their own words
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Perform a Google Scholar search for particular concepts and identify any conflicting definitions of the concepts.
These extensions may be more appropriate in the middle phase of the course.
