An assignment for my "Tech for Teaching" class at SDSU requires us to follow Ed Tech related blogs on our reader than write up a summary of what we learned from reading these posts and how these lessons apply to our professional goals. This is the second of 4 Personal Learning Network reports on some lessons I have learned lately through blogs I follow in Google Reader.
This Personal Learning Network (PLN) report highlights two blog posts found through Google Reader covering different subjects that have been catching my interest recently. The first post titled "Top 100 Learning Game Resources" provides information on how to add interaction to eLearning based training solutions while the second post, "How to build your personal brand on Twitter" covers how to make yourself more marketable by building your personal brand. The lessons learned from these blog posts will help me improve the quality of my work and help me to do a better job of marketing the results of my work.
One of the most difficult aspects of eLearning development is creating a course that is interactive and engages the learner. A great way of doing this is to build game playing into eLearning courses. While I have dabbled with online "Jeopardy" and "Who wants to be a Millionaire" type games, I have been intimidated to create anything more advanced due to the time and technical knowledge I thought was needed. Upside Learning’s "Top 100 Learning Game Resources" has helped me to realize that I may be overcomplicating game development and that with the resources they have listed; it can be easy for someone like me to easily build game play into eLearning courses.
I am currently employed with a great company but have hopes to someday become self employed or take advantage of better opportunities in the corporate training industry. An important part of reaching this goal is marketing my skills through online services such as Twitter. With roughly 6 million users and a predicted 18 million by 2010, Twitter is plentiful with opportunities to network with other professionals which can potentially lead to career opportunities. Mashable's blog post "How to build your personal brand on Twitter" by Dan Schawbel provides great tips for showcasing your brand on Twitter in an effort to create career opportunities. As a relatively new "Tweeter," I had no idea there were so many apps available specifically designed to help you build your brand. One app in particular that I found interesting was the Twitter Grader which ranks your influence in the Twitter world using an algorithm. This post inspired me to dive deeper into Twitter not only to improve the effectiveness of my personal learning network, but also to create career opportunities by building my personal brand.
The blog posts described in this personal learning network report have inspired me to go out and build fun into my eLearning courses, and excited to create career opportunities on Twitter. I used to steer away from including games in my eLearning courses out of fear it was too complicated until Upside learning's post "Top 100 Learning Game Resources" gave me the courage to increase interaction in courses by building in game play. Mashable’s post "How to build your personal brand on Twitter" has convinced me that it is worth spending time on Twitter building my personal brand in an effort to create future opportunities. After learning these valuable lessons I am excited to jump back in to my PLN to learn more about each topic.
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Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Moodle: Quiz Scores not Saving
Oops, where are the scores! I recently learned a valuable lesson after implementing an eLearning course on Moodle where quiz scores did not save. It's not a great feeling when someone put's out the effort to complete a course but you have no record of their completion. Here is the situation and solution, hopefully it will help another frantic Moodler with missing quiz scores.
The Situation:
The course consisted of multiple assignments and quizzes that needed to be completed by a large group of people. Because it was a large group and some of the assignments needed to be manually graded, I enrolled Supervisors as "Non Editing Teachers" so that they could grade their subordinates assignments. I was under the assumption that if I enrolled supervisors as "Non Editing Teachers," they would be able to both complete the quiz and grade their subordinates. I soon found out the hard way that if you need a users quiz score to save, then they can't be a "Teacher" of any kind. Unless, you override permissions like I describe below.
The Solution:
Turns out I am not the only Moodler to have come across this problem. A quick search in the Moodle Forums turned up several pages of answers to my problem. From my research in the Moodle Forums, I learned that "Teachers" and "Non Editing Teachers" have permissions to "Preview" quizzes instead of "Attempt." When a quiz is previewed in Moodle, the scores are not saved in the gradebook which is why my supervisors scores did not save. They were all "Previewing" the quiz instead of "Attempting" it. All, I needed to do is override the "Preview Quizzes" and "Attempt Quizzes" permissions and the "Non Editing Teachers" scores will save. Here are the steps of what you need to do if you come across this rare problem:
Related Posts:
The Situation:
The course consisted of multiple assignments and quizzes that needed to be completed by a large group of people. Because it was a large group and some of the assignments needed to be manually graded, I enrolled Supervisors as "Non Editing Teachers" so that they could grade their subordinates assignments. I was under the assumption that if I enrolled supervisors as "Non Editing Teachers," they would be able to both complete the quiz and grade their subordinates. I soon found out the hard way that if you need a users quiz score to save, then they can't be a "Teacher" of any kind. Unless, you override permissions like I describe below.
The Solution:
Turns out I am not the only Moodler to have come across this problem. A quick search in the Moodle Forums turned up several pages of answers to my problem. From my research in the Moodle Forums, I learned that "Teachers" and "Non Editing Teachers" have permissions to "Preview" quizzes instead of "Attempt." When a quiz is previewed in Moodle, the scores are not saved in the gradebook which is why my supervisors scores did not save. They were all "Previewing" the quiz instead of "Attempting" it. All, I needed to do is override the "Preview Quizzes" and "Attempt Quizzes" permissions and the "Non Editing Teachers" scores will save. Here are the steps of what you need to do if you come across this rare problem:
- Go to the course site.
- Click on "Assign Roles" in the Admin menu.
- Click on the "Override Permissions" tab located towards the top of the Assign Roles screen.
- Click on "Non Editing Teacher" or whatever other role you want to override from the Override Permissions tab.
- Scroll down to the Quiz section of the override permission screen and locate the "Preview Quizzes" and "Attempt Quizzes" permissions.
- Set the "Attempt Quizzes" permission to "Allow" and the "Preview Quizzes" permission to "Prevent."
Related Posts:
Monday, July 6, 2009
eLearning Learning Upgrades
Dr. Tony Karrer strikes again with more improvements to the eLearning Learning site. I've mentioned in previous posts how useful the eLearning Learning site is as a research tool and it just got better with a few nice upgrades.
Related Posts:
- Best of - I used to subscribe to the "Full" RSS feed for eLearning Learning but that can be difficult to keep up with. Now there is an RSS option for the "Best Of" feeds which according to to Tony, "consists of feeds that are limited in number and point to the content that is the best stuff based on social signals." Now, I subscribe to the "Best of" feed so that I can keep up with the hot posts and don't have to do as much skimming.
- eMail Subscription - If you follow RSS feeds through email, I highly reccomend you stop the madness now and switch to a reader like Google Reader. If you still want to stick with your emails then you can now subscribe to eLearning Learnings feeds through email.
- Wordpress - The site is also now integrated with Wordpress which opens the door to more improvements in the future.
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Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Personal Learning Network
An assignment for my "Tech for Teaching" class at SDSU requires us to follow Ed Tech related blogs on our reader than write up a summary of what we learned from reading these posts and how these lessons apply to our professional goals. This is the first of 4 Personal Learning Network reports on some lessons I have learned lately through blogs I follow in Google Reader.
As an Instructional Designer and eLearning developer, many of my personal development goals revolve around improving my visual design skills. While “the look” of an eLearning course is a crucial element, it is also one of the areas I am weakest in. This PLN report highlights a couple of blog posts found through Google Reader that are helping me to improve my visual design skills.
The first blog post is from the “Rapid eLearning Blog” by Tom Kuhlman who provides great advice for creating effective eLearning, rapidly. His post “5 Common Visual Design Mistakes” reviews some of the common mistakes committed by eLearning designers and how to avoid making them. One of the common mistakes that I learned from is the third mistake, “Graphics Don’t Match.” In my own work, I have found that sometimes it can be difficult to find a graphic of what you visualized in your design. Often I will find my self searching through several different resources resulting in a variety of graphics in the eLearning course that don’t necessarily match. The graphics add to the content and help to reach the objectives but some times they don’t match the overall theme of the course. This blog post helped me to realize the impact of matching graphics so that they are a part of the whole. Tom does not go into detail about how to do this but he does provide a link to another great post for custom designing graphics that match. With Tom’s tips I will be able to improve the effectiveness of my eLearning courses by using graphics that add to the course as a whole.
The second blog post is from Cathy Moore’s “Making Change” blog. I’m a long time follower of Cathy’s blog and have learned a lot from her posts about creating engaging, lively eLearning. In a recent post titled “Could Animations Hurt Learning”, Cathy reviewed the results and implications of recent research which studied the results of eLearning courses that use animations versus the results of eLearning courses which use static images. The results of the study showed that students who used the eLearning course with only static images had significantly better test results than the students who used an eLearning course using animations. This post has reinforced that often fancy animations can distract from the content of an eLearning course and in many cases you are better off using static images and in some cases you may be just as effective using a solution as simple as a PDF document.
These posts taught me valuable lessons that contribute to reaching my professional goal of improving my visual design skills. The “5 common visual design mistakes” post taught me how to use graphics that appeal to the learner while the “Could animations hurt learning post” taught me not to over use animations as they can distract the learner from the content. I look forward to learning more about visual design and creating effective eLearning from these blogs.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Early Tweeting Experience
I reluctantly jumped on the Twitter bandwagon about 3 weeks ago and while I am experiencing a little information overload, it has been fantastic. I was reluctant to start using Twitter because of the amount of information I am already consuming through Google Reader and on LinkedIn. Although I am already taking in a lot of information I was looking for a better format for discussing this information with other corporate training professionals. Turns out that Twitter is a great format for discussions and I am also finding other benefits that I was not expecting.
Twitter is known as being great for engaging in discussions but I am also finding it works as a great filter for the overwhelming amount of information I am taking in through Google Reader. I spend a lot of time skimming through blog posts in my Reader and only read the posts that catch my attention. I have noticed that with Twitter people in your network help reduce the amount of skimming needed by posting links to the great posts they have already found. Because of this I am spending less time skimming through my Google Reader and more time on Twitter looking at links passed on from people I am following. It will be interesting to see how my time spent reading blogs from my Reader is affected by finding all the juicy information without the skimming on Twitter.
While Twitter is helping me find great information easier, the downside is that there is a constant stream of information flowing down my Twitter page. To deal with this I am using Tony Karrer's "Skim Dive Skim" approach. When I first started with social media I felt the need to read every post and RSS feed as if they were all an important email. In my short experience I have learned that you really shouldn't try to read everything and you'll get more from the experience if you scan through and find what is important to you. While skimming can be a dangerous habit I am finding that I am able to find a lot more valuable information and waste less time reading information that is not important to me.
Now that I am sold on the benefit of Twitter I am working on creating a larger following so that I can get even more value from the experience. It is obvious that by having a larger number of followers, it is easier to engage in discussion and create a larger network. But, it is also as important to have a quality following of professionals with common interests and challenges. I'm starting to get annoyed with the spammers who follow me in hopes that I will automatically follow them back and I am only following people when there is a potential for us to engage in conversation and learn from each other.
I'm looking forward to seeing the value of Twitter increase as I connect with a larger network of people. If you're on Twitter, let's follow each other. If you're not on Twitter, jump on the bandwagon because you're missing out. You can find me on Twitter @joe_deegan
Related Posts:
Twitter is known as being great for engaging in discussions but I am also finding it works as a great filter for the overwhelming amount of information I am taking in through Google Reader. I spend a lot of time skimming through blog posts in my Reader and only read the posts that catch my attention. I have noticed that with Twitter people in your network help reduce the amount of skimming needed by posting links to the great posts they have already found. Because of this I am spending less time skimming through my Google Reader and more time on Twitter looking at links passed on from people I am following. It will be interesting to see how my time spent reading blogs from my Reader is affected by finding all the juicy information without the skimming on Twitter.
While Twitter is helping me find great information easier, the downside is that there is a constant stream of information flowing down my Twitter page. To deal with this I am using Tony Karrer's "Skim Dive Skim" approach. When I first started with social media I felt the need to read every post and RSS feed as if they were all an important email. In my short experience I have learned that you really shouldn't try to read everything and you'll get more from the experience if you scan through and find what is important to you. While skimming can be a dangerous habit I am finding that I am able to find a lot more valuable information and waste less time reading information that is not important to me.
Now that I am sold on the benefit of Twitter I am working on creating a larger following so that I can get even more value from the experience. It is obvious that by having a larger number of followers, it is easier to engage in discussion and create a larger network. But, it is also as important to have a quality following of professionals with common interests and challenges. I'm starting to get annoyed with the spammers who follow me in hopes that I will automatically follow them back and I am only following people when there is a potential for us to engage in conversation and learn from each other.
I'm looking forward to seeing the value of Twitter increase as I connect with a larger network of people. If you're on Twitter, let's follow each other. If you're not on Twitter, jump on the bandwagon because you're missing out. You can find me on Twitter @joe_deegan
Related Posts:
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Manual Grading in eLearning
We all love multiple choice, true/false, matching or any kind of quiz questions that can be graded automatically by an LMS. We also know that these types of questions are not very effective but we keep on using them because they are easy to come up with and don't require manual grading. This leaves us with the dilemma of cutting corners and using auto graded questions or sucking it up and putting in the hard work to manually grade essay questions and assignments submitted to the LMS. I've decided to suck it up and sacrifice automatic grading for more effective assignments that will need to be graded manually. Now I have the challenge of coming up with a plan to manage the grading of these assignments for +1000 employees.
My plan of attack for managing the manual grading of these assignments is to have supervisors grade and provide feedback to their subordinates. This will take the load off of me and I believe learners will get more out of the experience because they will receive more valuable feedback from their supervisor rather than some guy they barely know(me). Sounds like a simple plan but now I have to put on my "Trainer" hat and train supervisors how to grade these assignments submitted through Moodle. Although this plan does still require work from me to train supervisors how to grade and provide feedback on the assignments through Moodle, I believe the benefit of learners receiving valuable feedback and coaching from their direct supervisor out weighs the work required to train supervisors and definitely beats grading them all myself.
I'm curious to hear how larger organizations handle the manual grading of assignments submitted through the LMS, or do large organizations avoid anything that needs to be manually graded? The +1000 employees that I am dealing with is small beans for a fortune 500 organization but they also have a lot more resources at their disposal.
At this point, I can't imagine handling the manual grading of assignments any other way than having supervisors take on the task but I am very curious to hear what other organizations are doing to handle this task. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions of how to handle this challenge.
My plan of attack for managing the manual grading of these assignments is to have supervisors grade and provide feedback to their subordinates. This will take the load off of me and I believe learners will get more out of the experience because they will receive more valuable feedback from their supervisor rather than some guy they barely know(me). Sounds like a simple plan but now I have to put on my "Trainer" hat and train supervisors how to grade these assignments submitted through Moodle. Although this plan does still require work from me to train supervisors how to grade and provide feedback on the assignments through Moodle, I believe the benefit of learners receiving valuable feedback and coaching from their direct supervisor out weighs the work required to train supervisors and definitely beats grading them all myself.
I'm curious to hear how larger organizations handle the manual grading of assignments submitted through the LMS, or do large organizations avoid anything that needs to be manually graded? The +1000 employees that I am dealing with is small beans for a fortune 500 organization but they also have a lot more resources at their disposal.
At this point, I can't imagine handling the manual grading of assignments any other way than having supervisors take on the task but I am very curious to hear what other organizations are doing to handle this task. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions of how to handle this challenge.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Jumping on the Twitter Bandwagon
Okay fine, I'll check out Twitter and see what everyone is talking about! Until now I have held out from jumping on the Twitter bandwagon because of the overwhelming amount of information I am already taking in through Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogging and my RSS feeds in Google Reader. However, it is all of these resources that are encouraging me to start using Twitter. The final tipping point is that my Summer school course, "Technologies for Teaching" covers Twitter and it looks like some class activities may take place using Twitter. So, I finally set up an account @joe_deegan.
I am hoping that Twitter provides what Facebook and LinkedIn do not, a running conversation with other professionals in the Training and Development industry. It's easy to get conversations going on Facebook, but I like many other people use Facebook for family and close friends who would be bored to death if I started tweeting about eLearning or corporate training in general. I use LinkedIn for professional networking but it is more difficult to get conversations started on LinkedIn. Most of my use of LinkedIn involves using discussion boards or starting email conversations with connections and very rarely do I receive responses to status updates. From all I hear about Twitter, it sounds like it is much more conducive to starting these "live" ongoing conversations about training and development.
So far, so good! It's a much quicker setup than Facebook or LinkedIn. I was impressed with all of the tweeters it pulled out of my Gmail account for me to start following. I am getting up to speed on Twitterisms with Michelle Martins blog post "Your guide to Job Search, and Personal Branding on Twitter." She has quite a few links to articles that will get me up to speed quick. One thing I am unsure of is whether I should "protect my updates?" I am thinking no so that I can be found in Google searches etc.
I'm excited to see what Twitter brings to the social networking table and I hope I get a lot out of it. If you are tweeting, help me get some conversations started by following me @joe_deegan.
I am hoping that Twitter provides what Facebook and LinkedIn do not, a running conversation with other professionals in the Training and Development industry. It's easy to get conversations going on Facebook, but I like many other people use Facebook for family and close friends who would be bored to death if I started tweeting about eLearning or corporate training in general. I use LinkedIn for professional networking but it is more difficult to get conversations started on LinkedIn. Most of my use of LinkedIn involves using discussion boards or starting email conversations with connections and very rarely do I receive responses to status updates. From all I hear about Twitter, it sounds like it is much more conducive to starting these "live" ongoing conversations about training and development.
So far, so good! It's a much quicker setup than Facebook or LinkedIn. I was impressed with all of the tweeters it pulled out of my Gmail account for me to start following. I am getting up to speed on Twitterisms with Michelle Martins blog post "Your guide to Job Search, and Personal Branding on Twitter." She has quite a few links to articles that will get me up to speed quick. One thing I am unsure of is whether I should "protect my updates?" I am thinking no so that I can be found in Google searches etc.
I'm excited to see what Twitter brings to the social networking table and I hope I get a lot out of it. If you are tweeting, help me get some conversations started by following me @joe_deegan.
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