Assessment Structure. In order to assess student participation in the production of the course’s digital commons, I plan to incorporate that participation into the assessment structure of the course. At the start of the semester students will be assigned groups, and each group will be assigned to a particular course text. Each group will then be responsible for building, maintaining, and presenting a site for their assigned text. The graded components of this assignment will have three parts (each designed to assess a different component of the problem).
- In order to assess individual students' active engagement in establishing an environmental context for the course, each individual student will be responsible for uploading and/or linking to a designated number of sources (13?). ֲý will also be responsible for annotating and/or presenting these sources on their site.
- In order to assess students collaborative responsibility in maintaining an environmental context, each student group will be required to present their site to the entire class during a designated class session. Ideally, these presentations will occur before the class sessions dedicated to a particular text.
- In order to assess individual students ability to use the contexts they have generated, each individual student will be required to draw on the course’s “digital commons” to produce a final inquiry-based paper or project for the course.
Indicators. In order to assess whether or not the above problem has been addressed by my implementation of technology, I will need to work out a way of measuring students’ active engagement in and collaborative responsibility for establishing, maintaining, and using the environmental contexts for the course. In order to do so, I will need to:
- Monitor and assess students searching, compiling, and curating of information related to course texts/media.
- Monitor and assess students collaboration and interaction with each other in relation to the compilation and curation of information related to course texts/media.
- Monitor and assess students' use of compiled and curated information in both in class conversations and out-of-class inquiry-based projects.
Overall, then, I will need to find ways of measuring and assessing the development of students’ dispositions towards and capacities to generate the environmental contexts for texts and media.