Moodle and assessment

Moodle and assessment

by A. T. Wyatt -
Number of replies: 9
Yesterday, I received an announcement from Blackboard introducing the new Blackboard Outcomes System. Here is a snippet of the announcement:

The Blackboard Outcomes System enables the planning, measuring and improving of outcomes in both academic and administrative units. It provides a full set of instruments for student and program assessment. Key functions include the ability to:

  • Define, share and use student learning outcomes, rubrics and curriculum maps
  • Collect and evaluate artifacts of student learning
  • Run online course evaluations and attitudinal surveys
  • Understand outcomes with analytical reporting
I am guessing that this is an additional module for purchase.

I attended a presentation recently in Orlando of our university accreditation body (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, if that helps!) where one institution discussed their choice of Angel over Moodle because Angel is working very hard on allowing for the use of tagging course assignments with standards, and then allowing the performance data to be aggregated across several levels (student, course, department, etc.)

I see a reference to this sort of thing on the Moodle Roadmap, but haven't seen any postings on it in some time. I think this is one of those features that will become critical in the decision process of selecting or staying with a particular LMS. So far, no LMS has really been able to deliver this function and quite a few separate products are available to do this tracking and reporting. But having it integrated with the LMS would be quite attractive to universities and schools who are trying to document learning and student performance.

Anyone have any insights or news on how Moodle is working toward this goal? (and I am under no illusions about the difficulty of such a goal! I am currently trying to design a database to perform much the same function, just as a test run, and I think it is quite a challenge).

atw
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Ralf Hilgenstock -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi Alicia,

we presented this week the first time a great integration with moodle

Moodle & Odalis -> MoOdalis.

This tool organizes all processes around the learning activities in the Moodle Course room.
- course catalogues
- registration, authorization
- course conception, search in all document types, document creation
- creating new course rooms
- document integration and linking in courses
- search for documents in courses
- documentation of registrations, improvements, results from activities or courses, skillmanagement...

You can design your own forms and tabels, you can design dependencies of several activities. Have a look on our first presentation at http://dialoge.net/dok/Moodalis.htm

In a view weeks we can show you the complete integration in an online system. Send me a mail.

Ralf Hilgenstock
German Moodle Partner.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Ralf Hilgenstock

Re: Moodle and assessment

by A. T. Wyatt -
Wow, Ralf! This looks pretty impressive. I remember testing the search capabilities a year ago; this presentation shows a lot of new features! Thanks for the link.

atw
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In reply to Ralf Hilgenstock

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Sean Keesler -
I am working at Syracuse University on team that is producing the "Goal Management" and "Goal Aware" tools project for Sakai (and now the Open Source Portfolio project). I'd love to see what the Moodle community is doing in this arena.

At the heart of the Sakai system is a tagging manager service that allows any tool to register as a provider of taggable items. We have a the assignment and portfolio tools tied in so far. The idea is to be able to allow any teacher the ability to tag their assignments/quizzes/test, etc with expected learning outcomes and rate performance against these outcomes in a consistent manner. We then want to present this data to the student as fodder for further reflection and planning in the portfolio system.

I'd love to get a demo of what is being done here! I would also love to give a demo of what we are doing to anyone (teacher or developer) who wants to figure this out with us (and maybe even dream up osme interoperability between the systems).
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In reply to Sean Keesler

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Peter Campbell -
Hi, Sean. Count me in! I'd love to see a demo of this Sakai tool. Write to me off list and we can set something up.

campbellpATmailDOTmontclairDOTedu

Peter
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Peter Campbell -
I discussed the Bb Outcomes System several years ago with Bb's VP of Product Marketing (David Yaskin) when it was being called "Caliper." He seemed well aware of the challanges of implementing such a tool. This new tool will be sold under (yet another) separate license. Pricing will be based on FTE. Expect it to be expensive.

One very powerful tool that I really like in this area is called Taskstream. According to this link, they have formed a collaboration with Moodle. Not sure how well the two play together. Has anyone seen them in operaration together? One very nice thing about the Taskstream tool is their pricing: students pay an annual fee to use it, about $50 US dollars per year. This is roughly how much a textbook costs. So there's no huge institutional fee with the associated lock-in to a single solution.

I mention cost because there are already so many obstacles in the way of doing institutional assessment of the kind that the Bb Outcomes tool is proposing to make available that have nothing to do with cost. A prohibitively expensive "solution" would make it all the more improbable.

Personally, I agree with you, A.T. I'd love to see a Moodle-based solution to this area. If such a thing existsed, I think more institutions and users would play around with outcomes assessment and begin to get comfortable with it. But if users are told by top-level administrators that they have to "assess outcomes or else" in order to justify the cost of buying the tool, you'll likely see the kind of gaming of asssessment data that you see as a result of No Child Left Behind in US public schools. As Campbell's (no relation) law tells us, "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is
intended to monitor."
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In reply to Peter Campbell

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
> According to this link, they have formed a collaboration with Moodle.

I've never heard of them before. Looks like they've just written a plugin or something.
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Peter Campbell -
Here's what Taskstream's tech people said:

• A Moodle administrator establishes a link to TaskStream on the Moodle site.
• The first time a user clicks the TaskStream link from Moodle, they will be promted to fill out a form. After filling out this form, the user will be able to seamlessly access TaskStream from Moodle without needing to fill out the form again, and without needing to enter username and password to enter the TaskStream site.
• The initial form asks the user to identify whether he/she has an existing TaskStream account (should he/she happen to have one)- and if so, entering the username and password for that TaskStream account-, or whether the user would like to create a new TaskStream account. Payment terms for creating a new account can be done in a number of ways. The user can use a credit card to create an account. Or, the user can enter a keycode that customizes the registration process. A keycode can be obtained by an administrator who contacts TaskStream and sets up the terms of payment (e.g. length of subscription, whether the student pays via credit card or the institution, etc.). Using a keycode allows a learning organization to customize and streamline the registration process.

Disclaimer: The directions above use a feature that already exists within the Moodle interface. Therefore it is a relatively easy process to set this up. However this Moodle feature is not the most secure method to transmit information (first, last name, Moodle username, userID). This is something you should consider if you decide to use this implementation.

TaskStream also has their own API for silent authentication. To make use of TaskStream’s silent authentication protocol, a customer requesting silent authentication will need to build a simple authentication servlet that serves XML responses. Please contact TaskStream to learn more about this option and for a white paper on this protocol.

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In reply to Peter Campbell

Re: Moodle and assessment

by Sean Keesler -
Its been a while since I visited this idea of functionality like goal management in Moodle.

Given the (still) rather distributed nature of learning environments on many campuses, I wonder if serving things like competencies/standards/goals even makes sense to put in ONE platform. I'm thinking of a stand alone tool/server that could manage and serve learning outcome sets across the campus. platforms for engaging students (such as Sakai and Moodle) could have a plugin that would consume a web service from such a tool.

Comments on this idea?
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