Brandon Muramatsu

muraPOI: December 17, 2012

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  • Designing Assignments that Accomplish Course Goals: Wait, shouldn’t all assignments do that? We all know that isn’t true. I’ve claimed all along in this MOOC-craze (and even standardized testing), it’s all about the quality of the assessments. Maryellen Weimer writes:

    “You might think a bit about your course goals. Is this particular assignment helping students accomplish them? Are there ways you could change the design that might align it more tightly to course goals? There’s great opportunity for creativity and innovation in the design of assignments and more faculty are taking advantage of that.”

    (Via Faculty Focus, December 5, 2012)

  • Grades and Assessing Learning: Can’t We Get Along?: A few paragraphs in, the author Mark Salisbury writes:

    “This brings me back to what I perceive to be an odd disconnect between grading and outcomes assessment on most campuses. It seems to me that if grading and assessment are both intent on measuring learning, then there ought to be a way to bring them closer together. Moreover, if we want assessment to be truly sustainable (i.e., not kill our faculty), then we need to find ways to link, if not unify, these two practices.”

    Learning is more about transmitting and acquiring content. Hence, our assessments should be doing more than just focusing on content.

    (Aside: I think the article loses some of it’s value because it’s easy to get caught up in the “Doing more work will kill the faculty” sentiment at the beginning and end of the article.)

    (Via Inside Higher Ed, December 4, 2012)

  • Getting Over Learning Styles: Learning styles, hogwash! Wait, maybe not. Larry Spence writes:

    We haven’t figured out how to deal with this diversity in learning. We decide what to do in the classroom based on crude averages or on the techniques that we like or do best, leaving many students to flounder or figure out how to learn on their own.

    And…

    Since the research on learning styles has failed to confirm that how we present material can improve student learning, maybe we should focus on what students do with course materials and think of our role more as managing a work team than transmitting metaphorical “content.”

    Move from content to context. One of my new favorite phrases.

    (Via Faculty Focus, December 6, 2012)

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