Three Interesting Poster Sessions: Procrastination, Learning Database, and Moodle Themes

Blogging the Online Learning Consortium International Conference 2014

Student Procrastination in Open Testing

The University of Central Florida has a centralized testing process for lower level undergraduate courses. The study was on student procrastination in taking their test over the time window allowed for the exam. The more students procrastinated, the lower the average exam score. I found this session really interesting for the connections to the self-paced completion study that I’m working on. Studies of student procrastination where they have a choice – and the relationship to their success. Very interesting. 

Innovating to Improve Student Engagement and Reduce Instructor Workload: A Case Study of a Digital Photography Course

George Bradford from University of West Georgia has been building a tool to support reflection and student projects in his digital photography class. He is working on how to manage creative classes like digital photography where for grading, the teacher needs to review several pieces that students submit – the URL for their work and where it is in the cloud; the before and after version of the concept, the student reflection on what

Photographer: Janine Lim
Moodle Design: Photographer: Janine Lim

they learned. This is hard to keep in an LMS in an easy way to grade. Now that he’s building this tool, he’s starting to think about how that learning could be aggregated across semesters and students could learn from each other. I think it’s always interesting to see tools develop to support a more constructivist learning environment. 

Simple Steps That Make a Significant Difference: Improving the Visual Design of Your Online Course(s)

This was a really cool poster. Kristen Ferguson from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary shared how their Instructional Design team basically created a development site in Moodle for all 40+ undergraduate courses and gave them a visual upgrade with a template. Then they unveiled it to faculty and asked if they wanted to use that! Cool. I want to do that with some of our online courses that haven’t yet experienced a visual upgrade. Pretty amazing process, and completely sidestepped the whole concept of design by committee! After that, they were open to faculty requests for changes. Overall feedback from faculty was extremely positive.

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