As each sunday I’m going to summarize my week of learning activities.
Review
This week, I learned a lot of new things in Didaktics of Media – especially caused by the two sessions that we had exceptional on Thursday.
The first lecture was about “Didaktical-Methodological Design”. We save different didaktical models that we knew already: constructivism and behaviourism. A nwe term was “Instructional Design”. I figured out that I experienced the idea behind this term in my bachelor program: we had a software project with real customers defining the requirements. So we were given an authentic learning environment that helped us to act actively and to define the learning goals ourselves.
Another new didaktical model were the “Five Cs”. Those are creation, communication, cooperation, construction and collaboration. I stated that collaboration is the best form of learners interacting that you can have. In my own studies I experienced the success of collaboration in typical group work projects – looking at exam preparation, I liked the individual learning more, because here it’s hard to really share the understanding with others. I noticed how important collaborative systems are in software projects: if you think of wikis to store the knowledge that was achieved by the developer group for example. I noticed this several times, including our winter term project
Didaktical elements are mostly about elements during the teaching process, such as learning objectives. Methodological elements are about the contents on the one hand and about the communication. There are different points about how to structure the contents. I noticed that many learners complained about the navigation through the contents most. Methodological scenarios are about the kind of learning environments that are given (online course vs. presence for example). I understood that e-learning environments such as Moodle support a lot of different methodologies (like polls, social media elements that allow contribution,…).
In the second lecture we learned a lot about the creation of online exams and the special requirements that we need to think about. In online exams, you have different ways of proctoring and a completely different learning environment that might influence the student. E.g., the results might get lost due a hardware failure and the student could be feared of that.
There are different question types that you can use. Each question type allows to check a certain level of Bloom’s taxononmy: multiple choice questions can be used to test facts, the comprehension and application level. Ordering questions appear to be good for comprehension, too. Essay questions are good to let the student formulate by using his own logics model which is good to check the comprehension, application and evaluation level. In general, you can’t test the synthesis level. Multiple choice and ordering questions can be graded by the e-learning management software while essay questions cannot be graded by a machine.
I think it is hard to formulate exam question. During this course, we need to write our own multiple choice questions. I hope I’m getting good in this.
Goal for next week
My last goal was to find some apps to improve my learning process on the IPad. I used “Evernote” for the first time and was suprised about the possibility of structuring different kind of notes. I will have a look on the usage of it.
For the next week I have to “refresh” and old goal: to define learning objectives. I noticed that I didn’t clearly define those in my last reports.