and I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate an (paper) activity. For several years I've had students attend campus events of their choosing, and write responses on index cards which I graded on a 1-5 scale. They then had to get, say, a total of 40 points during the term to get an 'A' on that portion of the course. The trick (and the bit that's causing me problems with Moodle) is that they can attend as many events as they wanted to (and had time for), and turn in cards for all of them. Any points above 40 were ignored.This activity has a number of nice properties, but the downside is you end up with a lot of notecards, and it's easy to get behind. It would be cool to move this to an electronic setting both to simplify the management of the mini-essays and to potentially allow for peer feedback (esp. when I get behind).
The three candidates seem to be forums, journals, and workshops, but I can't figure out how to make any of them actually work for me. Forums allow for multiple posts, but average all the ratings instead of summing them, and journals and workshops are one-time deals (with workshops being synchronous to boot).
I could presumably impose a lot more structure and have something like a one journal or workshop every week or two where students can post an "event card" if they have one, but this really changes the nature of the assignment, and I'm not real happy when the technology tail wags the pedagogy dog
Any thoughts on this? The closest I've found is this patch (from this thread on extra credit) which allows for cumulative scoring in forums. It doesn't provide for a cap, though, and I probably can't get patches applied to the production system on short notice at this time of year.
Many thanks - Nic
