You're looking at the new interim OER Program Coordinator. Yikes! So much to learn while having to engage students and the administration in ways I never did before. It is exciting as well as somewhat overwhelming. Luckily I am surrounded by wonderfully supported folks from the guy who left this position to become a Dept Chair to the Vice Chancellors who call the shots.
I have a lot of training to do (on my own) before I can be cut loose to control budgets, personnel, expenditures, and grant management.
Nevertheless, the experimentation with ungrading continues. I presented at a few conferences as well as led some discussions and a workshop here for my colleagues on OER and ungrading, two sides to the same coin I'm arguing.
I have created four videos on ungrading. A scaffolding if you wish. I've created a list of many questions, some of which I've been known to assign for their ungrading essay while other times I use them to help students get their creative juices flowing. For example:
What aspects of the course have been most successful for you so far?
What thing that you've learned are you most excited about?
What was the most important thing you learned?
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
What challenges have you encountered? How did you overcome those challenges?
Describe your support network for this class.
For any group assignments, consider the feedback you offered your peers on their work, and how you met your own goals.
Include links to examples of your work both ccessful and unsuccessful. What explains the differences?
Did you miss any significant work? Why?
Is there anything you are particularly proud of? Explain why.
Can you see your work improving over time? If so, where?
What did you not particularly succeed at, and what is your plan to do better moving forward?
What has been the most surprising thing you've learned so far? Why is that the case?
Have you made any new connections with the library and/or tutoring department?
And here is one of my new videos on ungrading.
Fall 2022: This is the End is the topic that I selected for this assignment. After reading Fall 2022: This is the End, I was interested in the student’s responses to economic realities. As I have experienced being a student, our income has never matched our expenses for living standards. When a student must consider what is necessary to consume for daily survival, we are faced with being an excellent student or reliable employee to withstand basic living standards. The blog is insightful as the author is an instructor explaining his reactions to student responses. The essay questions were idealistic and offered another angle for learning.
ReplyDeleteWhat is my superpower and why?
My superpower is resilience and grit because I am eager to learn and not to be afraid of failure, especially as a foreign student. Learning English as a second language is not easy, it takes an extensive amount of time. I enjoy difficult challenges; I never give up until I get things done and I can motivate people around me to accomplish demanding goals.
The second essay question is what is my prize possession and why? I initially thought of family because of my emotional attachment to my children. I want to lead by example. Time is another valuable possession we must use wisely. After considering my prize possessions, I would say my health after surviving a car accident I take pride in my exercising and disciplined sleep routine, and maintaining good body mass index will prevent disease and build strong immunity.
I congratulate you on being the new Interim OER Program Coordinator. I read your blog post that you have a lot of work ahead of you, and I am hopeful that this will be a tremendous success.
ReplyDeleteAs a foreign student, I am most curious about the effects of ungrading. I had to quickly check the meaning of the word as it is quite new to me. Ungrading is described as "a practice which eliminates or greatly minimizes the use of assigned points or letter grades in a course, focusing instead on providing frequent and detailed feedback to students on their work, in relation to the course learning goals."1
It is further described as “a form of ‘grading for growth,’ in that the primary purpose of the assessment is to help students learn and improve their knowledge and skills, rather than to create a summative score that students use to compare themselves against an external credential."2 Nancy Chick proposes, “Ungrading is said to help with Metacognition which is described as thinking about one’s thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance.” 
My curiosity about ungrading further stemmed from my experience as a student in Nigeria, my country of origin, where students are not graded based on their understanding of what the lecturers have taught them but rather based on their ability to churn out the same definitions and understanding verbatim or near verbatim. This approach to learning places excessive pressure on students because the emphasis is shifted from learning to cramming or attempting to know enough to get good grades. The problem, by extension, is that some students graduate without proper knowledge of what they went to learn in school, while some students graduate knowing what they studied but not being enthused about going further in their learning. For these students, the grading system broke their spirit and their will to learn.
I have friends back home in Nigeria who swore off furthering their studies because the grading system crushed whatever interest they had in academics. Personally, I would like to see where this experiment with Ungrading gets education, in particular, what outcomes can result when it is embraced in Nigeria. Many students stand to benefit from Ungrading. I am excited for the new things I am about to learn and the possibilities of growth that the course seems to hold for me in the coming weeks.
Bibliography
Chick, Nancy. “Metacognition.” Vanderbilt University, February 9, 1970. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition.
Kenyon, Amy. “What Is Ungrading?” Duke Learning Innovation, September 22, 2022. https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2022/09/what-is-ungrading/#:~:text=Ungrading%20is%20a%20practice%20which,to%20the%20course%20learning%20goals.
Ross-Nazzal, Jim. “Fall 2022: In the Beginning. . .” Fall 2022: In The Beginning . . . Accessed July 12, 2023. https://drjrn.blogspot.com/2022/09/fall-2022-in-beginning.html?m=1.