This evolved from the question posed of how might we organise [digital] resources to offer a better student experience. When we think of other media we engage with, we might have online streaming of our film, tv or music that can be categorised into genres, albums or series or by similar themes (if you liked this, you might also like...).
If we engage in leisure media in this way, why would we want to engage in learning resources in a flat, rigid structure with only one journey through the material. Whilst there's always going to be some content that must precede other content, as we're reminded by Graham Chapman, we're all individuals. How each engages with the material and journeys from topic to topic should be as personal to suit the individual.
By using OneNote, all of the resources and media that already existed from previous iterations of the module could be organised in such a way that learners could choose which resources to engage with to suit them best for a particular topic. The OneNote is then shared as a single link in the module VLE.
Careful curation from year-to-year prevents the resource becoming unwieldy whilst ensuring it remains up to date and relevant.
“Well structured. Resources and support available”
“Feel like the way it was structured was good and engaging”
“The use of one note, allowed me to go away in my own time to teach myself little bits I had missed out”
“the material that we were gave was easy to access what makes it a lot less stress”
“the use of the one note, its so visual and full of examples”
“great organisation of content online”
When sharing basic mathematical questions with students, it may be preferable for each student to have their own question set to attempt.
There are a number of ways of doing this including question banks and randomising the order of questions. A further method, more involved method allows all students to have different variables for the same question based on their student ID. Note however, this is unlikely to be marked easily via tests of the kind in-built into VLEs and will require some manual intervention.
To set individual variables for questions, a spreadsheet was used into which every student typed their student ID and from this indvual numbers were produced.
If we're all individual, learn in different ways then why wouldn't we want individual feedback on our work? We all have different strengths and weaknesses and, whilst some are common across a wider cohort and make generalised feedback valuable, we each too benefit from information specific to us as individuals for our growth.
Self-evaluation in the first instance allows students to critically reflect on their performance in a module. Through the use of rubrics and plotting self-reflections onto them, personalised comments can be made addressing not only the student's performance but their performance in relation to how they percieved they had done, giving a fuller and more meaningful (and individual) feedback experience.
"Really good, I like how I can see exactly what marking points i hit and didn't hit"
"The self assessment seemed to work well"
Are digital tools for feedback liberating or constraining? presentation, DigiEd: Horizons (2023), University of Lincoln
Self Evaluation and Rubric Marking Example
To download, open the link above, go t File-> Download-> Microsoft Excel (
.xlsx), open the download folder and delete the .xlsx file extension, leaving only .xlsm at the end of the file (you may need to turn on file extension visibility in you folder options).
Right clicking and accessing the file properties you can also "unblock" the file at the bottom of the general file properties tab.