Shelley Heller

Teaching Tip:

One-Minute madness, teamwork, and online testing:

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My favorite tools of assessment are:

1.) Richard Light’s famous one minute madness. I use it at the end of every class. On one side I ask what topic of lecture was and the other side the one thing I sat here for two and a half hours and still did not understand. Now, I can give in-depth answers to those questions and I post them on blackboard on a section called One-Minute madness which helps the students very much. I can highlight one or two in my next lecture and then I think it is fair game to use that in an evaluation later in the course.

For team projects, consisting of 3-5 people, every other week students turn in a diagram of a circle of everyone in the team on that circle somewhere. It is a nice visual check for me to see if everyone is inside the circle which indicates the team is working well. If the students are on the edge of the circle, then they need to work on integrating themselves better.

Instructional Technology Tip. The ability of student to say privately what they did not understand and can respond on blackboard with an answer for everyone to read. The other part of ITL is that my courses can rollover. I can look at my class from a previous semester and check what I did and if it was a good idea.

The online exam through blackboard has pedagogic value, but not initially. By the third semester, it becomes more useful. It takes a long time to create a quality test as many questions need to be created, ranging from easy to hard difficulty. Then they must be pulled by a random generator to form the test for each student so not every student gets the same exact question. It takes a long time to balance the questions so the tests are not perfectly equal. Automatic grading makes life much easier as the students receive their grades right when they finish and committing to the online exam is a good investment for the long haul.

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