//Louisa Stein is an assistant professor of Film and Media Culture who used both Moodle and WordPress in the spring of 2011 for a course on the “Aesthetics of the Moving Image.” Prof. Stein used WordPress for the public face of this course and Moodle for the weekly outline of readings, online discussion and assignment submissions. Watch the screencast below for more details. Continue reading “Integrating Moodle and WordPress”
//Jason Mittell (Film & Media Culture) and James Morrison (Political Science) are faculty at Middlebury who are moving towards completely paperless teaching and research. Both cite similar reasons for preferring electronic versions of papers, articles and even books. Digital documents are simply easier to organize and access when everything else you do is on your laptop. Having your students submit electronic versions of their assignments means that you can retain a definitive copy of all your students’ work which is handy when you need to write references, find model essays from past classes to guide your current students or search for evidence of plagiarism. This case study will focus on receiving and grading electronic versions of student papers.
//All the Language departments and Language Schools at Middlebury require students to take a placement exam before enrolling in language courses or programs in order to ensure students take courses at a level appropriate to their knowledge of the language they want to study. Amongst language departments, the Spanish department was the first to create an online version of their placement exam in a web application referred to as Measure. Prof. Nancy O’Connor used the Spanish department exam as a guide for developing an exam for students of French.
The exam contains about 90 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions, and progresses from easier points of grammar — verb conjugation in the present, possessive and demonstrative adjectives — to more difficult ones — choice between past tenses, use of the conditional and the subjunctive. There is a section to test reading comprehension, consisting of questions concerning a short text. The exam is configured to allow students to access the questions only once and has a time limit of 1 hour 15 minutes. Student answers are saved to a database and scores can be exported into a spreadsheet. Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.”