As announced earlier this semester, DoIT and Visual Arts have partnered on a one-year license to Lynda.com, the popular online software training platform. However, short of simply recommending Lynda.com, how might faculty actually assign and evaluate any external training or competency they'd like their students to attain?
While Lynda.com doesn’t provide built-in assessments per se, it does allow users to print, email, link or otherwise share certificates of completion (aka “badges”) for any of its courses. Also, as a Blackboard content partner, faculty could track students’ progress in Lynda.com through the Blackboard grade center. Both of these options create interesting possibilities for assessment:
- Faculty could assign Lynda.com modules on topics for which they don't have time to reinvent the "show and tell" format that Lynda does so well already.
- Students could be required to earn and upload a related Lynda “badge” as part of a Bb assignment, or faculty could monitor student progress in Lynda through the Bb grade center.
- Using Bb’s adaptive release function that displays content (including assignments) based on date, content review status, group membership or grade on a prior assignment, faculty could make Lynda badges – or a percentage of progress in its tutorials – a pre-requisite condition students must meet before accessing let alone completing additional formative or summative assessments.
For example, before students can even see, let alone submit, an attempt on the first assignment for credit, many UMBC faculty are now requiring students take and pass a quiz over the syllabus as their first online activity. If a passing “syllabus quiz” grade is recorded, the next assignment link is visible to students. If not, it remains hidden. Instructors can determine what constitutes a passing grade, how often students can attempt the quiz, and when it must be completed. Combined with Bb’s “early warning” alerts, students can be notified they haven’t taken or passed the quiz and its expiration.
Once faculty see how adaptive release works, they often develop simple, but effective activities to leverage it. For example, the following “use cases” were presented at a 2012 workshop on how adaptive release can help students take responsibility for learning:
- An accounting instructor created a quiz based on his screencast demo of how he wanted students to use Excel pivot tables. If students passed the quiz, they got access to an assignment requiring their mastery of the skills the video demonstrates. More info.
- An ancient studies instructor regulated student acquisition of Latin and Greek, to absorb and apply her mini podcasts, instead of trying to race ahead at the start of the semester or cram them all in at the end, a pedagogical problem she’d encountered before.
- Instead of losing points as the semester proceeds, a chemical engineering instructor rebranded his Bb grade book by having students “level up” and earn video-game like “achievements” based on completed tasks and scores in the grade book.
Basically, if instructors implicitly value technological competency, or any skill for that matter, they could explicitly demonstrate why this is important in their assignment criteria for students. As such, faculty could judge effectiveness of technology competency in applying course concepts but rely on Lynda.com to help develop it in their students.
Similarly, faculty concerned about students' incoming math ability could identify and assign students to earn a badge or certificate of completion for a specific module in Khan Academy, the free online education site anyone could access with Facebook or Google accounts -- including UMBC students. Then rinse & repeat steps #2 & #3 above.
Finally, DoIT is working with the campus' Academic Integrity committee to pilot an academic integrity tutorial in Blackboard that leverages the Bb Achievements function, including a certificate of completion that faculty could require students to upload before they can turn in any assignment for credit.
