Has anyone found a way to use iTunes U courseware to assess student progress?
I believe the short answer is "no", but I'm curious to know what you mean by "assess progress". Do you mean "track progress completing course posts & assignments" or "test and grade after each post / assignment"?
Very interesting topic about assessment in/with iTunes U Course Manager.
Patixa, would you please offer some thought on these:
Thanks a lot.
It would be REALLY great if iTunes had a feature for adding tests/quizzes to iTunes U courses and if it had better metrics on the progress of each student taking the course. A lot of learning management tools (like Blackboard and Moodle) offer these features but iTunes provides a better (and usually free!) selection of learning content to choose from. Classmarker.com sells a pretty good quiz/test tool that you could link podcast students to. It autogenerates a certificate so students would be motivated to click the link and take the quiz outside of the iTunes app.
It would be great to see where they are in the courses - if they've opened a post, if the document has been downloaded or read, if they're gone through more than one course, etc. The reports wouldn't have to be robust - just enough to monitor if the enrollees are getting through the content.
The additional option of having a test, quiz or survey would be awesome as well. We use a learning platform that is separate from iTunes U because they have no options for this issue. It would make so much more sense to be able to create and track them inside the iTunes U Course Manager. That's what being a Course Manager is all about!
iTunes U 3.0 added homework hand-in and grading. Obviously assessment is still manual – the teacher must grade each student's work – but it's a leap forward that I welcome.
I requested support for quizzes / tests from within iTunes U a while ago, but I'm curious to know what others feel is missing.
Testing on itunes U
