In between Meetings 4 & 5

First there was a presentation to give on Gotland which took up the entire weekend, and then the whole family came down with a stinking cold … Life's never boring!

The main business of Meeting 4 was the Role Play Exam, and there were a few people who couldn't make it that day. It took a few e-mails to fix a time when they could all meet together, but we eventually fixed on Wednesday, 16th April as the day.

I'd also asked students to form groups of three to do Assessment 3 at Meeting 5 (the group presentation), and one of them notified me at the very last minute (24 hours to go) that she'd not been able to find anyone. I didn't manage to fix that in time for Meeting 5, but at least that's also fixed for next week.

This problem isn't a specifically Second Life problem, but is rather connected with the nature of a skills-based course. If you're going to test people's performance - particularly in conjunction with other students - then they just have to be there on the day. I'd allowed for this contingency in my course hours budget, though, so it hasn't 'cost' anything extra.

Apart from that, preparing for Meeting 5 was fairly straightforward, since the actual teaching at the Meeting is fairly minimal. I adapted a common warm-up exercise to get the students started speaking English again - and to make sure that all the equipment was working. Then I created three new layouts on the database: 1) the Assessment 3 marksheet; 2) the summary of course marks; and 3) the report form which officially reports the results to the office so that they can be entered on to LADOK (the Swedish national university results database).

Two of the students sent visual aids to me in advance for use at Meeting 5, so they needed uploading to SL, and I also needed to upload the slides relating to Meeting 5 for my own use. These included a facsimile of my Assessment 3 marksheet and a suggestion for a framework for the course evaluation which happens at the end of the course.

There's also a standard, official, computerised, 32-standard-question course 'valuation', which Högskolan will send out to anyone who has a student computer account (only four of the students on this course fall into that category) on 29th April, but that's something fairly separate from a proper evaluation to find out how the course went and what the students actually thought of it. More about this, though in a later post.