Lynne Elkins

Bryn Mawr College

This activity was designed for a moderately large lecture class (~50-70 students) at the introductory, undergraduate level. It is adaptable to significantly larger classes.

Conducting independent research; preparing a basic annotated bibliography of reputable sources; basic recording, digital uploading, and website navigation skills; oral presentation skills.

This project is situated about 2/3 through the introductory class, as an independent research project on geologic topics of each student's choosing.

Content goals are only limited to topics covered within the course syllabus. Each research topic is self-selected and work is almost entirely self-directed. Students are required to meet with the course instructor for approval of their topics, in order to ensure that project scope is reasonable and that topics are appropriate for class subject matter.

Gathering of resources, independent study, synthesis of researched material, communication and instruction skills, presentation skills.

Oral presentation, working with sources, using technical software and hardware resources.

This assignment is a small, independent research project to be conducted by the students in a moderately large, introductory geology lecture class. It uses the Moodle workshop module and the particular software and hardware available on Bryn Mawr College's campus in 2012, but is widely adaptable to other settings and resources. This project represents an updated assignment and, based on outcomes, a dramatic improvement over past research presentation projects used in our Geology 101 class (i.e. written papers and poster sessions). While the level of instructor preparation necessary is high for the first time this project is implemented, rewards are likewise high and preparations in subsequent years are relatively straightforward.

A set of instructions that can be modified and provided to students is available under the assignment heading below.

I developed, tested, and then refined this project for a Geology 101 class that is sometimes team-taught. It replaced previous independent student research projects that variably assigned 5-page research papers (due to large class size and syllabus timing, papers in this class were difficult to assess in a useful way that gave students a chance to revise drafts with incorporated feedback) and in-class poster sessions on independent research topics (increasingly difficult to do with our aging, ailing large-format plotter). Our campus also began testing and implementing Moodle as our campus course management software at the same time that I began trial tests of this project. Refining the project later included working with our computer and media labs on campus to pinpoint the best resources for our students to record their presentations.

Implementation of this project does require initial research on the part of the instructor into campus resources and course or assignment management software, as well as a briefer annual update to those resources whenever the course is taught again. It was designed for use with a Moodle course management software package that included the Workshop module. Other course management packages, or assignment and peer evaluation software (e.g. iPeer) are capable of similar approaches, but the instructions will need to be adapted directly to the software being used. The sample instructions provided are particular to our campus as of 2012, and will need to be modified both as resources change from year to year, and for implementation on other campuses. They nonetheless provide good examples and suggestions for some of the available software out there for this type of technical work, and demonstrate the instructional components I have found it helpful to give our students for this project to run smoothly.

I strongly encourage working with the appropriate technical/IS/computer lab staff on your campus in order to make this work. While the preparatory work is thus intensive, particularly in the first year this is conducted, the outcomes in my experience have been well worth the initial effort: students strongly appreciate this project and report finding it both rewarding and a great learning experience, in terms of content understanding and presentation/technical skills. In particular, preparing a podcast recording allows students to hone and refine oral presentation skills while avoiding some of the presentation anxiety that many of them find difficult to work through, allowing them to hone one skill at a time. It also introduces them to some good practice methods for producing podcasts, which is a useful technological skill for them to acquire.

The peer evaluations require some supervision for appropriateness, but overall run extremely well if set up in a thoughtful manner. For this particular implementation, the instructors graded each presentation individually, but for extremely large classes this is not necessarily the only approach to assessment (see below for more assessment details).

This project is assessed in several weighted parts:

1. Instructor evaluation of any additional required components (e.g., a required pre-project meeting with instructor for project approval, completeness and timeliness of project files, quality and correctness of annotated bibliography, etc.);
2. Instructor evaluation of presentation, using grading rubric within the Moodle workshop;
3. Peer evaluation of presentation, using grading rubric within the Moodle workshop (all students are randomly assigned 4-6 peer presentations to view and assess);
4. Workshop assessment of peer evaluations themselves, based on similarity to a mean and/or instructor assessment.

Assessment #1 was conducted off-line, as were corrections to mistakes students made using the Moodle workshop (these probably can be corrected within the workshop software, but are simple to correct by hand when you understand the grading formula that Moodle is using, so that is what I did). Relative weights of #2, 3, and 4 are set by the instructor when implementing the workshop module, as is the rigidness of #4 assessment by the software. While #4 can be turned off entirely, telling the students that they are being assessed based on the validity of their peer evaluations, even by just a few points out of their total grade, demonstrably encourages students to make thoughtful, honest evaluations of their peers' work. Overall the assessment software works very well and runs smoothly, as long as instructions to the students are clearly laid out in advance. Assessment settings and the grading rubric used are provided as additional files.

The document below presents a suggested grading rubric that can be entered as an assessment rubric within the Moodle Workshop:

Project Assessment Rubric (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 117kB Nov5 12)

Moodle's workshop module is described here: http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Workshop_module
iPeer is a possible alternative, though the manner of implementation and therefore student instructions will need to change. The iPeer wiki information is available here: http://ipeer.ctlt.ubc.ca/trac/

Free/cheap/communally available software links for the students to access are provided in the suggested instructions. Note that other web tutorials for software use, besides Atomic Learning, are available on the web and may be available by subscription within your institution.