danaleeling

As the Nuventive team has noted , Nuventive Improve does not retrieve data from the Instructure Canvas learning management system directly. While this was deeply disappointing to me personally as this means double data entry will have to done by faculty to get data into TracDat, my knowledge of Canvas and spreadsheets provided me with a path to reduce the amount of manual counting on my fingers work my courses would involve. Note that this process works as shown below if a faculty member is using course learning outcomes from the institutional bank of course learning outcomes in Canvas as outlined in a video on how to import course learning outcomes for use in rubrics and question banks. Start from the Gradebook and use the drop down menu to switch to Learning Mastery. The values seen in the columns are the outcomes results, on a five point scale calculating using a decaying average. In a rubric outcome achievement is deemed to be optimal, sufficient, suboptimal, or no evidence th...

With the division down to a single working printer and a broad mandate to go paperless, I looked at my one remaining primary use of paper: a clipboard that drag around outside in the rain for role call, conversion tables to use in the field, and field notes.  I informally polled the division with an email asking what technology they would need to go paperless. I was thinking of both software and hardware to replace whatever portions of their curriculum were still paperbound. Only one faculty member responded to the email, a faculty member who for over two years has requested but not received a Wacom pen digitizer tablet for use in conjunction with upper level mathematics courses. I took the non-responses of the rest of the division as entrenched opposition to attempting to go paperless.  I looked at my clipboard and then outside my window at the tropical rain falling. I had tried using my mobile phone in the field, but the screen was too small to be functional and my device is...

The last physical science laboratory of the term seeks to bring home the meaninglessness of the manner in which mathematics in taught in schools at present.  I start off my outlining the "math stack" from counting through arithmetic, algebra, and on up through calculus and beyond. I note that there are other fields of mathematics that do not make it into the stack, and yet they are no more useless to the average liberal arts major than knowing how to factor a quadratic equation. Because factoring quadratics is not a useful life skill. There are far fewer people on the planet getting paid to factor quadratic equations as a living than there are people who are paid to play video games for a living (check out the Asian competitive video game playing scene).  Then I lay out the patterns seen on the board and ask the students to predict the next letter, colored circle, arrow, or number in the sequence. Today all of the students were successful in answering my questions. I even ran...

SC/SS 115, like culture, slips away at term end with a whimper, not a bang. The course fades into the end of the term. After the April fifth invasive species walk the seventh focused on the intersection of climate change , carbon sequestration, and the role of trees in that carbon sequestration. Trees are not a simple one size fits all magic solution to the problem of carbon build up in the atmosphere.  Spring break then intervened in the calendar, ending the term in the minds of some of the students. On the back side of the late in term spring break attendance dropped. On April 19 I shared a few plant legends and stories from Kosrae and Pohnpei . On the 21st the students were to share a plant story or legend from their own culture. Of 15 students only six attended class and only three had a story to share. Which is the reality of a generation increasingly raised on and babysat by technology.  While some of the children in this Lukop, Madolehnihmw sand pile have an English ...

Page views dropped slightly in week twelve due to the cultural day holiday on Thursday of week twelve and founding day on Friday of week twelve. Week thirteen saw a return of engagement on Instructure Canvas platform as measured by page views, but this recovery was more than offset by the week of spring break, week fourteen. Week fifteen again showed re-engagement by students with the platform, but not back to the levels seen in week eleven. Page views per day spiked on the week twelve Wednesday ahead of the Thursday holiday that week. Although not as apparent in this chart, week fourteen exhibits a similar pattern. The strongest engagement was on Monday, the one day of the week on which classes were held.  The Monday spike on the week of spring break is more evident in a relative frequency chart.  Dashboard For courses on Canvas using the institutional bank of course learning outcomes , there have been 9078 assessments made of student learning. Performance is at the sufficien...

Laboratory fourteen functions as a laboratory practical for the physical science course, a chance to show that mathematical analyses can be applied to any physical system, and an opportunity to have some fun while doing science. The course is all about science as doing, exploring, engaging. Science as a process and measurement, as discovery. The course hopes to ignite, or reignite a spark of excitement and fun in science. The students are all non-science majors, many of whom have learned negative attitudes towards science. Science was either a lot of memorization or just plain hard. This course seeks to remedy that. There is a "let's go find this out" approach to everything. Not what you know, but what you can show.  In laboratory fourteen the students were asked to determine the mathematical relationship, if any, between the diameter of a hula hoop and the rate of rotation for the hoop. Renay hoops while Darla times The board behind Renay shows the introduction to the la...