According to Horton (2012), “Connect activities integrate what we are learning with what we know” (p. 163). Do and Absorb activities add new knowledge while Connect activities bridge gaps. There are several variations of Connect activities, and the ones I prefer to use in my classroom are ponder, questioning, and research activities. In the past, Art History classes were taught with a teacher-led, lecture-based format. Despite my passion for the subject, when I was taught this way as an undergraduate, I found the classroom experience to be quite dull. Not knowing any different, when I started to teach Art History years later, I followed the same teaching design. Not teaching in a lecture hall, I could see the utter boredom in my students’ faces. I quickly realized that this Archaic method of teaching was not reaching my students. So, without knowing what they were called, I started to use Connect activities in my classroom. I turned the lectures into conversations, asking students to discuss the content, ask questions, and evaluate the purpose of the art we were learning about. I gave them assignments that led to independent research and analyzing their findings in their own words. I found that this approach was much more suitable to my learners and we all enjoyed the classroom experience better than ever. These activities were easily transferred to online Art History courses in the forms of Discussion Boards and assignments that ask the learner to question the material on an individual basis.
Because of these experiences as a learner, and then a teacher, I have mixed feelings about traditional testing in general as well as testing in E-Learning design. Traditionally, tests were designed to measure how much material was retained by learners through objective and subjective questions. This can still work in the classroom, but, in Art History, testing in online courses does not measure content knowledge effectively. An online test mostly measures a student’s ability to search the internet for the correct answer. Subjective questions in a test is a better approach, but, there is the issue of testing stress. If we are asking our students to interpret new knowledge in individual ways with resources in hand, why can’t we do that in an assignment format instead of a test? If the goal of a test is to measure how much information has been retained, how can we know that the student is drawing from memory and not from Google? If I ask students to memorize facts for a test, I know they will quickly forget them and worse, they will not see the relevance of the material to their own lives. Take a look at this interesting video on re-evaluating traditional assessments:
What I find most important in this video is the fact that educators are re-evaluating how to effectively assess student knowledge. No, we don’t live in a world where we answer multiple-choice questions, so why are we still using them? I remember being infuriated when my kids were in elementary school because they were given daily activities where they practiced answering multiple-choice questions. The content was irrelevant: they were being drilled on how to take standardized tests. Summative testing is not as effective as essays and projects which creates student ownership of their knowledge. Making connections between education and the real world should be the goal, and only through appropriate assessments can we measure success.
Edutopia. (2015, Mar 16). Five keys to comprehensive assessment. [YouTube]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFimMJL3Wz0
Horton, W.K. (2012). E-learning by design. 2nd ed. Pfeiffer.
Tracy Collamore PLE Project 