Creating a Reflective Journal to Assess Acquired Skills One of the reasons why I am passionate...

Shereen Seo099

Creating a Reflective Journal to Assess Acquired Skills

 

One of the reasons why I am passionate about instructional design is the process improvement and reengineering that it involves. In many cases, the solutions I see on client course shells work but aren’t ideal, and with some improvement to the process flow, an ID can greatly enhance the learning experience. Today, I’d like to share with you one of these instances.

 

My client provides training for underrepresented groups (youth, women, and immigrants). One of their training courses emphasizes the acquisition of certain essential skills. Examples of these skills include leading a healthy lifestyle, adopting honesty, adopting initiative, working efficiently, managing stress, etc. They want their learners to reflect on most of these skills on a weekly basis but want the instructors to grade only the last reflection entry for each skill. Given the way the skills were distributed, the last reflection for each skill didn’t necessarily end up in the last week/module of the course.

 

Their solution to this was to create in each week an assignment folder for each of the skills emphasized. The assignment folders were set up with file submissions, so students had to upload their reflections on that particular skill.

Upon auditing the course, I realized that this set-up wasn’t ideal for several reasons:

 

1. Students had to upload a document in 5 or more assignment folders every week/module, which is inconvenient.
2.  If the student needed to see their previous reflection on the skill, they had to figure out in which week it was, navigate to it, and open the file.
3. Instructors had to somehow keep track of which skill to evaluate in which week – remember that only the last reflection of each skill is graded.
4. There were over 50 assignment folders, which made the course shell cluttered and confusing.

 

I wanted to find a better solution that would be more convenient for learners and instructors. I was looking for something that would resemble a reflection journal. After thinking, researching, and discussing with colleagues, here’s the solution we came up with:

 

1. I created 1 assignment folder for each skill and set the submission type to text.
2. I linked the same assignment folder for the skill to all of the weeks where that skill was relevant.

 

By doing this, students wouldn’t have to upload multiple files, and they, as well as their instructors, would have access to their previous entries all in one place. Instructors would be able to easily identify the last entry and grade it using the assignment rubric. Finally, the course would only have as many assignment folders as the number of skills evaluated.

 

Problem-solving and process re-engineering are two things I love about instructional design. I’d love to hear about what makes you passionate about instructional design!

Mike.B.559

Have you explored the possibility of using Discussion Forums for this? If you go into Groups, there is a workflow for creating Single Member "groups" so that you can use for 1-on-1 interactions with your students. CLICK HERE to see what I mean. And to reduce the overwhelmingness of all those folders, you might explore the use of a locker. I haven't actually tried this feature, but it might help reduce the clutter.