OUseful Info

Course Related Blogging

How can we use blogs to maximum effect in an OU course context? In When Your Past Comes to Haunt You, I posted a news item about the recent AOL search data release that would potentially have been of interest to students studying Beyond Google, if it had been in presentation at the moment, or of interest to alumni of that course as an 'alumni updating' service.

As it is, Beyond Google does not present for the first time until October, 2006; and as the course is still in production, there has been time to integrate the story of AOL's release of search data to the web into the course text.

At the end of that post, I also included what amounted to a text ad for the course, although I didn't go so far as adding a graphical banner ad!

Here, then, are several potential ways of gaining OUse-value from a blog post:

1. as a benefit to students, through pthe provision of enrichment material for students currently studying the course; that is, material that is optional and not assessable, but which provides and alternative way of looking at concepts or issues introduced in the course through relating them to contemporary news items;
2. as a benefit to alumni students, as updating material (think of this as a free upgrade to some software you have purchased);
3. as a benefit to potential students, leading them to a course that they were otherwise unaware of as the result of coming across a post in a subject they are interested in, or searching around;
4. as a benefit to the wider community, as material that becomes discoverable via a search engine hence potentially the answer to somebody's search query;
5. as a benefit to the course team, through providing draft content that can potentially be included in future presentations of the course, as well as maintaining current awareness within the course team about the state of the contemporary search landscape.

Integrating 'live' posts - that is, course content created whilst a course is in presentation - within the course as a topic scheduled for study by students as a timetabled item on the course calendar is another possibility, although it raises many issues regarding the design of a) the course materials, and also b) any related assessment material.

Typically, assessment material is completed before the start of the course. The OU Technology short course model means that all the assessment material for the course is provided to the students at the start of the course - an open book, known item assessment(?) strategy.

Writing assessment materials that can cope with content that has not been written at the time assessment material is prepared poses certain challenges, although strategies are available for phrasing such material. For example, questions may be asked along the lines of:

"Choose one of the posts that appeared on the Beoyond Google post between course start date and assessment submission date. What were the major issues/technical innovations described in the post? How are these likely to affect the current search landscape?"

Okay - so that's a bit contrived. But it's a pointer to the sort of question we might ask. (The Technology Short Course Programme courses are aimed in part at recruitment to undergraduate study from under-represented groups and adult returners to education, so the assessment style is intended to help develop study skills and encourage reflective learning as much as anything.)

Another approach might be to associate a question with a blog post at the time the post is written, and feed that into the assessment engine as an optional question. One problem with this approach is that it means students addressing the assessment at different times may effectvely be presented with different question papers.

However, where students are required to pick '2 from 3' questions in a traditional assessment, they are then essentially answering different questions for assessment (quamark giving) purposes.

And more importantly, if we are to start exploring personalised, emi-automated, rolling assessment, then this might provide one way of feeding new questions into the question bank and reducing opportunities for plagiarism, for example by requiring students to answer m from n course blog post related questions from a p week window occurring within the period of time they are registered on the course.

The scope for innovation in all sorts of areas is huge at the moment, but I fear that we are not exploring, or even scoping, the possibilities as passionately as we might be...

Posted by ajh59 at August 16, 2006 12:40 AM