WPP D - FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS

As planned, I created a trial account on Quia.com.  I created a class account for which students were given instructions on how to register.  I also created two timed reading activities and assigned them on the class page.  All students who registered for the class were able to see the assigned activities that they needed to complete.  At first, not many students registered and did the activities, but after discussing the issue with their teacher, he talked to the students again and was able to motivate more to participate. 

Because we are only in the middle of Phase 1 of this project (scheduled to end in June 2012), we really only wanted to determine if the website is something the students could and would access, the ease of use of the website for the students, the ease of use of the website for the teacher(s), and the effectiveness of the automatic evaluation of the activities.  I monitored the class webpage and found that a total of 16 students (out of 19) registered for the online class.  One student double registered, made evident by a repeated email address and similar name.  Of the 16 students who registered, 11 students completed both timed reading activities.  I believe that with enough encouragement, or perhaps the pressure of the activity being a requirement to graduate, a near 100% participation rate could be reached. 

Ideally, I would be able to interview each student to determine his/her reasons for registering or not registering and also to receive feedback about the website and the activities. However, distance works against me in this case and I decided to simply do a class survey.  As of the writing of this report, only six students have completed the survey.  I am hopeful that more students will complete the survey in the next two weeks.  From the survey responses, I found that the students had no trouble registering on or using the website.  The readings were just a little too easy for the level of the students and the allotted time for the readings was more than enough.  (Part of this is due to the fact that we originally planned to use an intermediate class for the trial run, but in the end chose an Advanced class to complete the trial run.  The readings were more appropriate for students at the Intermediate level.)  As Phase 1 continues and Phase 2 is implemented, I will increase the difficulty of the reading selections just slightly and decrease the amount of time to complete the readings to better accommodate the needs of the Advanced students participating in the trial run.  

One of the reading activities was followed by a series of true/false questions.  Overall, the students did quite well with this type of activity and the automated system accurately graded the activities and sent the results to the teacher.  The other reading was followed by a series of short response questions. In order to grade this type of activity, the teacher must create a series of possible answers to each question.  For example, for the question “Who told him the good news?” the possible answers could be “the New York City Police department,” “the New York City Police,” “New York City Police,” “the police in New York City,” etc.  Trying to determine EVERY possible correct answer that students may write is nearly impossible.  Though the system graded this activity automatically based on the responses I had created, I found that I had to go back and re-grade the activity because some answers were marked wrong because they did not exactly match the pre-determined answers that I had created even though they were actually correct.

For the continuation of this project and the implementation of the additional phases, I have decided to change from the Quia platform to the Canvas platform.  Canvas can do all that we need it to do, and there is no cost to the individual teachers nor the institution as a whole as there is with Quia.  The tech support for Canvas is great, and the overall platform has a cleaner look and feel to it.  Though Quia worked, I would recommend Canvas to others simply because of the cost factor.

After implementing this trial run, I believe that it would definitely be feasible for the CBA students to access and participate in online learning in order to increase their exposure to English outside of class time and build fluency by doing the timed readings and other activities.  I am excited to continue working toward a long-term solution as we continue to move forward on this project. 

Quia Gradebook

Survey