Group assignments - help!

Group assignments - help!

by Dan Jeffries -
Number of replies: 2
Hi all

I posted this up on the Groups board, but maybe it's better suited to here as it directly links to Assignments.

Hope you can help!


Hi everyone

Yesterday I spoke to a group of core tutors about some changes that we want to make to our Moodle site.

A bit of background.

We use Moodle extensively for submission of work. We have 9 colleges, each have, say 5 year groups. Each of those year groups has to submit work to 8 courses.

In the past, I have set up 8 individual courses for each of these year groups. As you can imagine, this is an awful lot of work and makes moderating submissions on a National basis difficult and we had something like 500+courses.

I therefore announced our intentions to move to the Groups system and rather than having each year group with the 8 courses, it now means that all students (using enrolment keys) sign up to the course. I explained that tutors can see only their own group of students in the gradebook.

However this was met with quite a bit of fear from the tutor team. In the past they have had the freedom to develop their own courses, but this has led to real inconsistencies in quality and consistency.

So, I'm interested to know whether I'm doing the right thing? Has anyone else made the move from duplicate courses to one course with groups? And how did you convince tutors it was the right move?

Also, do you think it's better to have 1 assignment submission area, or should tutors be allowed to create assignments only their group can see?

Lots of questions I know, but any thoughts would be greatly appreciated smile

dan
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In reply to Dan Jeffries

Re: Group assignments - help!

by Kathy Morello -

If you want students taking the same course from a number of different teachers to have the same program of study then using what I call cohesive Moodle course is the wayto go.  All teachers use the same resources (though they may add their own also if it accomplishes the same learning outcome) and give the same tests etc.  This has the added advantage of producing data about student outcome in the course allowing it to be used in evaluating teachers (though I would not necessarily focus on that).  To get teachers to accept this model will require some up front training and discussion of benefit to students.  I have taught in this model for a number of years and like the collaboration process that it requires.  With all of the free online resources for working collaboratively it should not be a problem for teachers at different geographic locations to work as a team.  Two heads are better than one and when uploading etc the individual teacher does not have to do all the work.

Warning though-teachers will likely balk at the idea initially so it may need to be presented as a requirement to get it started.

Hope this helps,

Kathy

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In reply to Dan Jeffries

Re: Group assignments - help!

by Garren Shannon -
Hey Dan,

If I understand you correctly, this information might help.

While we don't run a national system here, we have and do use groups extensively with quite a lot of success.

Mostly found in the general math and English classes, our teachers run multiple sections of say Algebra 1 or English Lit 1. The sections (or Periods since the sections are taught at different periods during the day) are ALL the exact same curriculum and so teachers don't want to setup 7 courses (one for each section or period)... the answer is Groups.

We ran this way last year and our teachers reported no problems with either students seeing other class work or teacher having issues managing the courses.

The only issue that was initially raised was a question of pacing. That is, one class (or section or period) getting ahead of another class. This is only an issue if the teacher did not want to "expose" the next topic until a specific assignment was complete or date had passed.

Hope that helped...

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