Interestingly enough this week everything is in alignment.
The course I’m teaching: Adult Education – Online and Blended Learning in Post-Secondary we are discussing authentic assessment. The entire program lives inside the LMS and most activity takes place inside the discussion forums. So of course, I asked: are discussion forums authentic? are you motivated to post?
Two of our readings this session are Christina Hendrik‘s (2015) Renewable Assignments: Student work adding value to the world and David Gooblar’s (2018) The Chronicle of Higher Education article: Will My Students Actually Want to Do This Assignment?
Gooblar’s article is a really good connection between what Christina is saying about authentic assessment and the excellent book (once described to me by an educational developer as the ED DEV BIBLE), Ambrose et al’s (2010) How Learning Works. HLW is also the framework for the eCampusOntario‘s Teacher for Learning module.
In the spring, I was grateful to be able to attend BC Campus Festival of Learning. In addition to brilliant keynote speakers, Jesse Stommel and Monique Gray Smith I attended Leva Lee’s session on bookclubs.
My centre offers bookclubs and I enjoy having a good book to dig into that I can discuss with my colleagues. Some of the books we’ve read are Walden on Wheels, Significant Learning Experiences, Threshold Concepts, The Reason You Walk, Colonized Classrooms, and more that I can’t quite remember (or probably didn’t get to read). While it’s been great for us in the centre, we haven’t had more than a handful of faculty attend. I am certainly interested at looking at different book club models.
This is why I was eager to help facilitate Leva’s online bookclub. We’ve met already for chapter 1: prior knowledge (facilitated by Leva) and chapter 2: organization of knowledge (facilitated by Lucas Wright) Each session starts with a blog post and people post comments through the week, leading up to Friday where we have a synchronous session to discuss. Last week was a reading break for us to catch up (if we fell behind) and this week it’s MY WEEK!
Chapter 3 is about motivation. Of course, my prior knowledge and the way I organize knowledge means I had to do a drawing before I could process the words for a blog post.
Interestingly, my Adult Ed students were confused by the way I set up the forum prompts, and it was a great meta moment to discuss motivation, grades, and authenticity in the discussion forums. (BTW, yes, I’m mostly using open resources for this course and my material will be available as an open resource but I’m not making the students work in the open yet. Just changing the grading format for the forums was enough of a seismic shift for them. I have one person blogging and I’ve encouraged her to sign up for 9x9x25. Here’s hoping she does! On the next iteration after the wrinkles are ironed out, I will try to move the course entirely more into the open)
Well, that’s more than 25 sentences but that was a minimum, right? Anyway, lots of cool stuff happening this week. Hope you are also motivated to do some awesome things (like join 9x9x9x25 and join this week’s online bookclub discussion!)
