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 Wednesday April 30 2008

My materials vs Commercial materials

Over the mid term exam period I set up a survey in my moodle course for advanced students using the excellent third party module feedback. In the survey I asked students to rate the various activities we had done during the semester as well as a couple of other questions to get a feeling for how the students liked my class. I’ve made a couple of adjustments for the second half of the semester.

What I found most interesting was the responses related to the activities we did during the semester. Students consistently ranked activities I made myself much higher than ones from teacher resource books. I’ve included screenshots (in the extended entry) of the survey results where I’ve highlighted in yellow the activities I did myself.

Do I think this means I make better materials than can purchased commercially? Yes and No. I make better materials for my teaching style and my students. With the materials I develop they are 100% tailored to my class and students. Many of the materials I created are available on this blog if you do a search for them. However with commercial materials they are designed to please everyone and quite often end up being less than excellent but better than okay.

Looking at the survey results makes me want to create more personalized material for my students but the amount of time necessary to make quality materials is alot and thus I am required to use my own material to mostly supplement. Any thoughts or comments? What is your experience with personally created material vs commercial?


click images for full size version


Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Apr 30, 2008 at 01:29 PM
Teaching | Moodle | teaching_application |

Picture of JMac

JMac wrote 40 words  on  Wednesday Apr 30, 2008  at  10:40 PM Korea (South)

Some good results. Congrats.  Only 9 in a class—nice!

Curious as to why you use 1 as ‘excellent’ and 5 for ‘terrible’ in your Lickert scale. Seems to be a bit of a golfer’s setup (shoot for the low score).

Sean.

Sean. wrote 17 words  on  Thursday May 1, 2008  at  07:02 AM Korea (South)

No particular reason for the 1 being excellent - actually I hadn’t even thought about the order.

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Seth Dickens wrote 87 words  on  Thursday May 1, 2008  at  05:50 PM Europe

Hiya Sean,

I totally agree that tailor made materials are always going to beat something out of a book hands down, every time. The trouble is, it really is sooo time consuming :-o

I am the Moodle trainer for our school and I constantly get grumbles and groans from our teaching staff when we are teaching online about just how much time it take to prepare materials.

Something that might interest you is the discussion over on the WebHeads pages about an open Moodle Repository: Moodle Repository

Sean.

Sean. wrote 27 words  on  Friday May 2, 2008  at  12:19 PM Korea (South)

Seth,
I’ll definitely check out that repository over the weekend - should be able to find time since it’s a three day weekend. Yeah for Children’s day!

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