There are a few schools involved in Australia and New Zealand in the pilot program. If successful and funding found, the progam can be scaled up to bigger and better things.

Teachers are required to submit a proposal that can be discussed / debated online. Students are required to research the proposal and go through a series of online screens that forces the students to articulate clearly about their stance on a proposal. The software breaks all proposals into social areas such as the Law, a group of people, human rights, dignity ect. The students rank each area by using interactive graphics. Most screens require an opinion by the student of no more than 150 words.

When the student completes the entire process, the software translates the responses into numerical data in various ways. The software also displays emperical data after a group of students have responded to the proposal.

The learning by students in this pilot program is two fold: one for experiencing the interface of the online software and two: improving their ability to persuade and / or analyse a scenario.

The teacher cannot just ‘whip’ up a proposal within 30 minutes. The teacher actually has to provide some thoughtful notes on the proposal and give details as to where further information can be found.

The author of the software, David Seedhouse, is more than willing to give assistance to teachers when polishing their proposal.

I created a proposal and with David’s assistance it evolved to:

It is proposed that social operating systems should be completely transparent and have no privacy restrictions.

The concept comes from the Horizon Report 2008. I choose one their concepts on social operating systems, identified a specific concept that may prevent social operating systems from evolving and created the proposal (again, with David’s assistance). My first proposal attempt was mediocre at best.

The language found in the Horizon Report 2008 is too complex for students in Years Eight or Nine. I did considerable re-phrasing in the hope that the students will be able to understand the concept.

To the best of my knowledge, anyone can go to the Values Exchange site and register to participate in some of the experimental proposals.

The Values Exchange Pilot Program can be found at:

http://knox.values-exchange.co.nz/

During my initial preparation and research, I discovered my textbook by David Grover was included in Course Compass and that an online presence is a definite possibility. Unfortunately, students need access codes to gain access to the course which will cost $7.60 each. I can afford that to come out of my budget.

Among several facilities, is an application entitled “TestGen” for test generator and the version is 7.4.1. The idea is to create a test on your computer and upload it to the IST course in Course Compass. I did some initial experimentation starting off with 5 multiple choice questions and uploaded them to the site. It worked quite well. I came unstuck trying to create True / False questions. I have not been able to indicate which alternative is the correct response. After several hours of trying different things and combinations, I gave up and sent a question to the Support Team. I did have to wait longer than 24 hours for a reply since it was the weekend. A correct solution was offered but it was NOT straight forward NOR were there a special set of instructions for the True / False type. It was not intuitive.

Technical glitches such as this hurts the online, elearning concept. It has to work if teachers are going to take it up across the curriculum. Course Compass is based on Blackboard but I did not find this out immediately. I assumed a commercial product should be operational and intuitive. Perhaps I will be proven incorrect and should have gone the Moodle route for a learning management system?

Conceptually, I am excited by the possibilities and can see some innovative experimentation happening. Technical glitches, please stay away! Sigh.

Postscript:

• I finally located a PDF file on TestGen where it indeed explained how to indicate which True or False option was correct. It still is not intuitive.
• I spent a long time experimenting with the Matching type question but I could not get it to operate on a web page. It did seem to work when printed out as a page, however.
  • Upon checking the Users Manual (PDF file), I found a little phrase that indicates the Matching type question CANNOT be carried out currently on a web page. Now that was a waste of time.
• I think I am safe if I just stick to multiple choice questions and True / False questions for use in a web page such as Course Compass.
• Creating a large bank of questions, that can be dragged and dropped onto a new test is worthwhile pursuing, however, I won’t see the benefits until I teach this unit twice.