This month, we’ve been focused on using plus-one thinking to improve assessments and grading practices. In order to see the fruits of your labor, you’ll likely want to take a peek at your gradebook. But does your gradebook truly reflect the work you and your students are putting into these assessments?
Does your gradebook truly reflect the work you and your students are putting into these assessments? The Center for Professional Education of Teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University shares the “F.A.C.T.S. about grading,” an acronym that presents guiding principles for good gradebook practices.
Join COLRS staff on Zoom to customize your gradebook calculations, views, and use advanced tools. We will use breakout rooms to keep your student data private.
This presentation will briefly introduce participants to generative artificial intelligence. After that, we will explore several generative AI tools for research and teaching. We will discuss ways to effectively engage with these tools and how we might use them in the classroom and other professional activities.
Adding a grading rubric is a simple yet powerful "plus one" strategy that can significantly elevate the quality of assessment and feedback for your courses. Rubrics provide clear guidelines, promote transparency, and streamline the grading process, ultimately empowering students to understand expectations and strive for excellence.
The design of a successful online course is very dependent upon the teaching and learning strategies that a faculty member employs.
What students should know and be able to do? Faculty should be ready and able to answer the question, "Why do I need to know this?!?" Learning objectives should represent measurable and/or observable behaviors -- think "more verbs and fewer nouns" -- for us to design around how people actively learn. As an instructional designer, you should ask yourself these questions when creating and reviewing objectives and outcomes:
Rubrics serve as guiding tools for instructors in evaluating their students' work or performance, enhancing reliability, validity, and transparency in assessments (Chowdhury, 2018). While not suitable for all scenarios, such as multiple-choice exams, rubrics prove invaluable for performance-based tasks like writing, oral presentations, and projects. Generally, rubrics fall into three categories: analytic, holistic, and checklist.
According to a study conducted by researchers at Grand Canyon University in 2013, “full-time online faculty reported spending the majority of their time on two teaching tasks: grading papers and assignments (36.93% of weekly time) and facilitating discussion threads (14.73% of instructional time).” We recognize the hard work and effort instructors spend on giving their students meaningful feedback, but we also recognize the need to streamline the grading process so your time can be spent elsewhere.
The FY24 budget for the state of Illinois appropriated $3 million in funding that the Illinois State Library has made for authoring, revising/remixing, updating, or creating ancillary materials for OER textbooks. The Open Educational Resource grant has a close turnaround time, with a maximum award of $150,000. Multiple grants can be submitted from the same institution. Applications are due to the Illinois State Library by April 1, 2024.