Blind choice

Blind choice

by John Isner -
Number of replies: 4
This may have been suggested before. If so, please forgive me!

I would like to suggest a very simple enhancement to the Choice activity that would allow us to implement what I call blind choice. Here is an example of blind choice in a brick and mortar classroom:

Assignments are placed in blank (unlabeled) folders. Each student is asked to choose a folder. Note that students are offered a choice, but from among alternatives about which they have no information until they open the folder. Typically, the folder will contain an assignment.

Choice currently has two fields for each alternative:
  • Option
  • Limit
In a blind choice, the options would be meaningless values like A, B, and C or 1, 2, and 3, and we would need a third field that is hidden until results are published (i.e., until after the Choice is closed):
  • Option
  • Limit
  • Actual choice
The Actual choice corresponds to the assignment in the unlabeled folder. Typically, it will identify an assignment. For example, if students are studying American history, the Actual choice might be the name of a president, such as Washington, Lincoln, or Roosevelt about whom students are to write an essay. Or, it might be the name of a file in a folder resource (the file contains the assignment).

Teacher could use blind choice with limits to effectively randomize assignments (currently, only Exercise randomizes assignments -- a very nice feature!).

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In reply to John Isner

Re: Blind choice

by Dan Marsden -
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Hi John,

Why would student interaction be required for randomisation? - couldn't you just use some other form of randomisation to distribute the assignments? - Why is the Student interaction needed?

I partially understand the need in the "bricks & morter" environment, as trying to randomly distribute physical assignments between a group of students wouldn't be completely straightforward, but when distribution of the assignment is made on-line, couldn't you randomly distribute the assignments without requiring student interaction?

smile

Dan

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Blind choice

by John Isner -
Outside Moodle anything is possible, I guess. I hadn't thought of it that way. I was thinking of a Moodle solution, and blind choice is a 100% Moodle solution.

The nice thing about blind choice is that it's fair and it's foolproof. Once a student makes his choice, he is locked into the actual choice. The choice is recorded in Moodle. There's no way to change it. No one can claim that the game rigged in favor of students who were somehow able to discover the actual choices, or who could get to the computer lab before others, etc.

Re: student interaction. The use of a Choice to distribute visible assignments is already a well-known Moodle pattern. It involves student interaction. Blind choice would therefore be nothing new to students. The teacher sets up the blind choice and the student interaction completes it. When the choice closes, the results are published and the assignment can begin. The whole process consumes almost no energy.

There is no foolproof way to implement blind choice with the current Choice activity. Can you think of one? Remember the rules:
  • it must be a 100% Moodle solution
  • it must be fair
  • it must be foolproof.
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In reply to John Isner

Re: Blind choice

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

I'm still unsure why you would use "student interaction" to create the randomness. - it relys on the students all logging in and selecting a project before the time period finishes... - Wouldn't a better solution involve a method of randomly distributing the projects without requiring the student interaction?

Also - I don't think this is completely a "100% Moodle solution" -in the Bricks & Mortar model mentioned as a result of the "blind choice" event recieve thier project documentation..

thinking about my "ultimate" way of solving this, I have a couple of ideas.....

1st Idea - Using an Activity Locking model that when selecting a particular option with a choice, - a group of Activities related to the choice made become available to that student. (one of the things I'd like to do with the choice module is have an option for teachers to automatically assign any remaining students to a random choice if they have not already selected one. - you could do this on creation of the choice if needed.)

2nd Idea - Using Group self-selection, - allow students to select which group within the course they want to be part of, - which you could then use to seperate the users within the course, and target specific content to them... (I like the activity locking model better....)

neither of these would add an extra field to the choice to allow the "blind" option.....

That said - if you still wanted to involve student interaction in the creation of the randomness(even though they would be able to select the same choice as their friend, so it wouldn't be completely random) and you don't mind running a custom Hack on your moodle install, it would be quick and easy to add an extra field to the choice to suit your needs!

smile

Dan

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Blind choice

by John Isner -
To eliminate student interaction, you could modify every activity (for example, Workshop and the various flavors of Assignment) to be like Exercise, allowing students to receive a random task upon first entering the activity. But this would be poor software design because it would replicate functionality that can be easily factored out into an separate randomization activity, i.e., blind choice.* Blind choice can combined with virtually any other activity to provide an element of randomization.

The screenshot below shows the structure of a typical composite activity.
  1. The student makes a blind choice. After the choice closes, the actual choice is revealed.
  2. In this example, actual choices are filenames. The student locates the named file in the folder and reads his assignment details
  3. The student performs the task and submits it.
Note that the files in the folder are visible, and any student who wants to can discover the assignment details BEFORE making the choice. But there is no way for a student use this knowledge to gain an unfair advantage over his classmates. If the choice were not blind, the teacher would have to hide the folder until the choice closed.

*You would actually end up with less code because you could eliminate the random task feature from Exercise.

Attachment Blind_choice.png
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