Creating the coursework (30th Dec 2011)
There has been a lot of work so far, but nothing the students can use. Surely, that preliminary stuff was a waste of time? Well, no. Creating anything useful requires preparation and good assignments are no exception. It is a bit like playing chess. You have to get all your pieces in place before you make your move - failure to plan is planning to fail (mostly attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but without quoting a source).
We have done a lot of planning so far, so now it is time to derive some of the benefits. It is time to create the assignment (or assignments, depending on your tastes). This is the be-all-and-end-all for many in our profession, but as you will see, even this will eventually be superseded. However, it is a necessary step along the road to atomised learning. Students need to have confidence that they know where we are heading when we ask them to do something. We have to sell the idea that completing this work will make a positive difference to them and a logical layout to the work will help that. So now, let's start looking at a logical layout.
A piece of work should have a title page. The title page should show the name of the course, the name of the unit, the assignment number and the key dates for handing in. The example below shows what has been developed in our department, but any sensible format that contains all the information will do. Some people like to give an assignment a name, e.g. Key Features.
The next page contains the learning outcomes and the specific criteria being assessed by this piece of work, for example :-
Next come the scenario and tasks. The scenario should reflect a practical situation that the student might meet in the real world. Some educators prefer a bland scenario which just gives a context to the problems being set. However, I find that students respond better to a scenario in which there are characters who need help. This means there is an element of story telling, making the scenario longer, but it does allow them to empathise with (and therefore internalise) the problem. So you would get something like :-
Some would want to stop here, but there are other pieces of information that would help the student; the format of the work they should present and the expected delivery dates for each criterion. The format of the work can be a variety of things. It used to be just written work, but now it could also be creating videos for YouTube, videoing a discussion, creating a web page, creating a presentation and so on. Being creative here make the process of creating the coursework more interesting for the students. The expected delivery dates allow the student more control over the pace of the work. The one-size-fits-all delivery dates has been justified as concentrating some minds, but there are other ways of doing that as we shall see in later blogs. Therefore, this might look like :-
The final stage to the assignment is a get-out-of-jail-free card provided by the awarding body. Students may well claim that our style of teaching does not match their style of learning, so providing alternative sources can work well. Fortunately, EdExcel provide just such a list. Their list has been added as alternative reference material :-
The hard work is now done for the assignment and we can move on to any other assignments needed for this unit - all produced in the same format.
The next important phase is to get the assignments internally verified before it is given to the students. This is important because we all make mistakes. Apart from the typos, spelling mistakes and "interesting" grammatical constructions, it is crucial to ensure that the tasks cover all the atoms required by the syllabus. It is sooo easy to miss something and finding your own errors is much harder than finding them in the work of others (we are teachers, after all).
It is not necessary for someone to be a subject specialist to internally verify your work (although it helps). However, you should give this person both the assignment and the coverage scheme. This will make their life much easier and will therefore result in you producing better assignments. The internal verifier should document the process, noting any changes needed (the typos, etc.) as well as any missing criteria. We have a form we use, but a formalised email may do just as well.
