Assessment and Technology

What are your thoughts?

2006-02-22T14:40:00.000-10:00

Please provide your feedback on the assignment or your thoughts about Assessment and Technology here.

Team member reflections on the assignment

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Margret's Reflection
This assignment faced a number of hurdles from the beginning. First, there was some misunderstanding as to what we were doing with the topic of “Assessment Centered Design.” Once we understood that this was our topic for the conference poster session, we needed to understand what “Assessment Centered Design.” The initial reading didn’t provide a clear overview. After doing some outside searching, we got a better definition and understood that this was not necessarily independent of the other learning environments. Next came the hurdle of understanding what a learning object is. It is still a bit unclear as to what the size and scope of a learning object should be but with the though that learning objects need to be reusable and adaptable to various situations, we opted to kept the learning object small. This however brought on the problem of whether the learning object was appropriate for the intended audience. With the audience being attendees of a conference on technology and higher education, the smaller scope that we had chosen seemed inadequate. We then struggled to broaden what we had to match our audience.

Margaret Ashlee’s Reflection
Once it was clear about what we will actually be creating – an overview of Assessment-Centered Design – we began to conduct research in this area. There were quite a number of resources available online through research databases. Having resources available online significantly reduced the number of hours we would have spent in searching for information. Most of the time spent was reading through content and deciding on information that should be considered to include in our project. I did further research on eportfolios and assessment. Again, there were a large number of resources available in this area. Much of the general information was discussed in several sources. From all the readings, I synthesized the information and put something together for my section in eportfolios and assessment.

Arnie’s Reflection
The initial process of figuring out what the meaning of “Assessment Centered Design” meant was a very important learning step for the group’s process of distinguishing how we were going to break up and analyze the different parts of assessing technology. Being familiar with assessment and technology I reviewed some of my previous research material that was gathered online using online databases. The ETEC website gave good examples of how to construct the poster presentation and format. The overall process was very educational and provided me a chance to review technology and assessment.

Project Need, Audience, Objective

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Need or Rational
As Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) state, effective learning takes place where all four learning environments converge thus an understanding of each component is essential to instructional design. (Changes in Educational Goals section, para. 6). Assessment is not a novel concept however translating assessment techniques to online learning opens a new world of solutions as well as problems. Understanding the possibilities and drawbacks of the online environment to assessment can significantly affect one’s instructional design.

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Retrieved January 23, 2006, from http://fermat.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/ch6.html

Audience Description
The audience of this learning object is the attendees of the 11th Annual Technology, Colleges & Community Worldwide Online Conference. Per the conference website, the event is “designed for university and college practitioners including faculty, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.” Their attendance to this online conference signifies several things: a) they have an interest in technology and education b) they have at least a basic working knowledge of online environments and c) they are at least moderately comfortable working with technology.

Instructional Objective or Outcome
The learning object will provide the audience with a basic overview of Assessment Centered Design as it pertains to online learning. Link to Learning Object http://etec.hawaii.edu/classes/2006/spring/etec649/Assessment_Centered/

Background on the assignment

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Purpose
To design, develop and present a learning object for presentation at the TCC Worldwide Online Conference. The learning object for this assignment should address one of the following topics for designing online instruction:

The learning object should also be reusable in this course as well as others covering distance or online learning.