Nagasaki Elementary School Student Cleaning the School Hallway

Self-Assesment for Moodle Course
Japan: an Integrated Study

The topmost thought in my mind is that I am very proud of the work that I’ve done in creating my course. So much of it fell together the way I wanted it to: the look and feel of it; the micro/macro of the integrative process; the general idea of the course as a whole: and the amount of learning that I obtained while creating in the VLE Moodle.

Having said that, there is so much missing from it and so much more to build on if I wished. As I said in my presentation, I have no natural constituency for this course. It was built for a phantom audience beyond my classmates. I will export the course to my server and I hope to continue to build on it, but without outside accountability there is a strong realty that some other project will push this one aside.

With the positive notion that I will move the course forward, without question I would reiterate and strengthen my course alignment worksheet/rubric. I would use the document to inform my course by going back to the worksheet to rethink and add to the objectives, the activities, and the corresponding assessments. It was just in the past few weeks when I was able to tie in all of what I learned to bring the course up to a higher level and more again as I focussed on course alignment.

This section:

is the most important to me and also the weakest. This is where I would begin to enhance the course. There are many more examples of the use of creative thinking asked for within the course activities, but I didn’t put in enough time or effort to draw those out and reinforce them.

I would also find ways to emphasize personal meaning and theme creation – finding ways to ask students to think of what they do well already and adding it to an ITI matrix.

Random thoughts:

• Some of the modules were just outlined and need complete development.
• I relied too heavily on discussion as assignment and would rethink how to mix up the activities more.
• I really wish I had a place to use this.
• I like the idea of incorporating food and using it as a practical function in assignment but would really have to rethink the approach and the way of sharing the creation. I would also emphasize the cross-cultural nature of food within themes.
• It seems to me from my experience and from the other students that a good course belies the time that went into its creation. At first glance, just as I open it, even I have a difficult time recognizing the amount of work that went into it – this feeling was magnified even more so when I reduced the file for back-up and export and it weighed in at a measly 6.6 MBs.

Nagasaki Elementary School Student Writing the Word River

both images: