Magna 20 Minute Mentor | How Can I Assess Students in my Online Classes through Student-created Videos?

During this video from the Magna 20-Minute Mentor series, Dr. Oliver Dreon presents information about how to use student produced videos to serve as assessment activities. Dr. Dreon proposes that many assignments instructors currently use in their courses can become a video activity, or be enhanced by adding a video component. Using video can be especially helpful in online courses to provide additional modes of interpersonal communications through voice, facial expressions and body language.

Having these additional audio/visual communication channels can offer more insights into students’ levels of comprehension than text-based learning activities by “making their learning more visible”. Dr. Dreon also suggests that using video assignments provides additional opportunities to enhance a Community of Inquiry, which includes teaching, cognitive and social presence. Additionally, he cites research that indicates student-created videos can increase student motivation, learner autonomy, and classroom community.

Dr. Dreon states that video assignments can be used in place of a wide variety of text-based activities. He explains using student-created videos instead of written papers, and also applying video assignments for student presentations, demonstrations, and reflections. Some significant considerations for any assignment are based on the Control Value Theory, which states that students will be more motivated to learn when they feel they have control and find value in the learning activity. Therefore, Dr. Dreon emphasizes the importance of creating assignments that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time oriented. Including detailed rubrics will help communicate with the students about the precise expectations of the assignment and the criteria that will be assessed. Lastly, in order to make these video assignments successful, instructors should provide tutorials that help students gain the required technology skills. Dr. Dreon also suggests offering links to applications that have general guides for creating videos such as YouTube, YuJa, Zoom, and Flipgrid.

This Magna video addresses the LCCC Faculty Competency domain for Teaching and Learning and can be accessed by completing this one-time registration to view all the videos in the Magna 20 Minute Mentor series. 

LCCC Curriculum Management System | New Vendor

LCCC has fully implemented the digital catalog live using DIGARC’s Acalog software—check it out! For the second piece of the DIGARC software, the CET is currently working with Edie Cox as our Project Lead, Registrar Stacy Maestas and ASC Chair Paula Badgett and Co-Chair Ashleigh Ralls on implementing Curriculog. With Curriculog we will be able to push updates to the catalog automatically. This allows less editing and consistent data with both systems.

The team is currently designing the forms for Curriculog and are planning to have the new system up by May 2021. Curriculog will have different functionality, which may seem to be more cumbersome at first. For instance, faculty will not be able to add prerequisite courses individually but those will need to be as one submission for all courses. This allows for that field in Curriculog to be pushed to the Acalog catalog. We're working to understand processing differences between Curriculog and currIQunet and anticipate training opportunities in the fall to help all faculty acclimate quickly.

The CET is working on archiving documents form the currIQunet system and will publish them to a new ASC Virtual Office site for easy access. Soon, currIQunet will be set to read only to prevent edits that will not be captured in the archive; we will not be able to access the old system after June 30, 2021. If you have any questions, please email cet@lccc.wy.edu.