Zuzana Kubincová

Blogging in Obligatory Course: A Bitter Victory

In the course of several years, we employed blogging assignments in an obligatory web design course. The assignment was able to attract interest of few students only, while the majority did not participate, or only very sparsely. It did not help much to make the assignment part of the course evaluation. The course received mixed reviews from the students. The students who were not really interested in the subject, or considered it too much work, complained. In last two years we tried to address this problem by introduction of a tight blogging schedule, and peer-reviews. As we report in this paper, this step radically improved the participation rate, and also learning outcomes were higher, however the student’s opinion of these activities was not amended.

May I Peer-Review Your Web Design Project?

Peer reviews are useful to engage students with their peers’ course work, leading to mutual reflection on the topic of interest, and consequently to increased quality of learning. We share our experience with the application of peer reviews on a full-semester project assignment in a Web design course. We describe the methodology that we developed and employed to manage the peer review process and analyze the results in terms of improved learning outcomes.

Peer Review Support in a Virtual Learning Environment

In this demo paper, we provide an on overview of peer review facilities of our learning management system.

Students’ Acceptance of Peer Review

Peer review technique used in educational context could be beneficial for students from several points of view. Besides of developing students’ writing skills, critical thinking, practising articulation of own knowledge to the others and giving them feedback, it can encourage collaborative learning and boost the students’ interest in the course. In our web design course we successfully introduced peer review activities more than 2 years ago. In this paper we discuss the students’ acceptance of peer review applied on evaluation of other students’ projects.

How to get around with wikis in teaching

Wikis were showed to be an interesting and powerful tool in education, supporting tasks starting from project management, collaborative data management, etc., up to more elaborate tasks such as collaborative production of lecture notes, reports, and essays. On the other hand, most wiki softwares were not created as educational tools in the first place, hence their application in curricula with groups of students faces some obstacles which need to be dealt with. These include motivating the students to engage with the tool, boosting collaboration between students, supervising and tracking students activity, and evaluation. A number of tools were developed to enable or ease these tasks for the teacher. This paper takes a look on selected tools developed with this aim with two main goals: to produce a concise list of functionalities that are needed, and to compare and evaluate the tools that are available.

Team-Based Projects and Peer Assessment. IT Works!

In order to make the assignments in our Web-design course more attractive for students, the educational strategies of peer assessment and team-based learning were employed. Students worked in teams on a whole-semester lasting assignment – a web application (project) based on their own designs. The project implementation was divided into three phases. After each phase all teams were supposed to submit their work for peer reviewing by other teams. Moreover, students peer-assessed also their team-mates contributions. Following this, each student’s score in every particular phase was counted based on her team project evaluation and also the peer assessment she received.

Peer Reviews in a Web Design Course: Now Students like Them Too

For several years we have used peer reviews in a web design course. The students published web content, originally in form of blog articles, and they received feedback in form of peer reviews from their colleagues. In the previous run of the course, this method helped us to improve the learning outcomes, however the students did not perceive the publishing/reviewing activity very well; they felt it is too much work and they are forced to do it. In the last two runs of the course we tried to cope with this problem by replacing blog development by more free web design-related assignments the topic of which the students were allowed to choose. They could come up with their own project. The students worked in teams, and peer reviews did not focus entirely on web content, but also on more technical aspects of the task like layout design, and on the team work inside the teams. The learning outcomes were approximately the same, however the students’ perception of the usefulness of the publishing/reviewing activities was much improved, as much as their overall satisfaction with the course.

eSkills IT fitness test 2012 in Slovakia

The eSkills IT Fitness test was conducted again in Slovakia after two years. We picked out the data from 34,775 respondents, analyzed them and compared the results with our last testing findings. We focused on young generation aged 15-24 and tracked the IT skills development in students mainly at primary and secondary schools. We also compared the results of the students of different types of secondary schools. Some of the positive findings showed an improvement in this area, e.g. on secondary grammar schools or secondary vocational schools. There were also some less encouraging findings, which lead to reflection about the efficiency of ongoing educational reform, proper curricula and IT skills of teachers on certain types of schools.

Team workflow and peer review in a virtual learning environment

Teamwork, management of responsibilities, and constructive feedback are some of the important soft skills that we want to develop in our university students, in conjunction with project-based learning that we exercise as part of practical assignments in various courses. This demo paper describes a custom VLE with integrated peer-review capabilities that we have developed to support assignments administration. The paper focuses predominantly on features supporting team workflow, and teamwork related feedback.

Blogging Activities in Higher Education: Comparing Learning Scenarios in Multiple Course Experiences

Blogging has been used in education with various goals and within various contexts. While many benefits of its application have been shown, it is not always clear what kind of blogging tasks should be used, and what is the proper methodology for their implementation, given certain educational goals. In this paper, we provide a large scale experience report on the use of blogs in several courses, run in two universities over multiple years, with more than 1500 students enrolled overall. A catalogue of blogging activities used for learning is provided, outlining their purpose and structure; their integration in four courses (different in terms of curriculum, student background and instructional approach) is also described. A set of findings and practical guidelines are drawn from our experience, which could prove useful to other educators who want to foster student learning through blogging.