February 2017 authoring online CPD

Practicalities

Starts Monday 27th February
Completely online
15 minutes per day, every day for 2 weeks
Choose your own time of day
CPD certificates will be issued on successful completion
To apply, take the pre-test, which is open now.

The course runs through a student account on Yacapaca, which you can sign up for at the end of this post. It uses some features you will be familiar with, and some that are not available to general users.

Philosophy

Unsurprisingly, I teach using the same philosophy I embedded into Yacapaca. Learning is your responsibility; my job is to provide the structure. In this case that includes pointers to useful content, collaborative activities and Continue reading →

A very short primer on gamification

Yacapaca is a gamified formative assessment system. I want to discuss briefly what that means, and how we interpret it in software.

Gamification is the art of making things you want to do anyway more fun, and more motivating. To understand why this is so powerful, I recommend this 12-minute TED talk by Seth Priebatsch because it is a lot more fun and motivating than the Continue reading →

How the Analytics pages fit together

Yacapaca has a dozen different analytics views, depending on exactly what you count as “analytics”. The table below shows the structure.

	Time progression	Block of time	Single assignment
Individual student	5. Evidence 6. Parent reports	Gradebook averages*	Gradebook* Activity log* Detail*
Student Set	7. Progress chart 8. Progression with metadata	4. Progress in topics 2. Quiz analysis	1. Gap Analysis 2. Quiz analysis 3. Analysis whiteboard

9. Pivot Chart (beta) does not quite fit in this table.

*strictly speaking these are Continue reading →

Managing students

How to add, remove and move students to and from your student sets.

Cloze vs. multiple choice

A pros and cons list for quiz authors. Continue reading →