Assessment

I am now at the stage of uploading the material as it is to the moodle platform. The challenge now is how to approach assessment. There are the obvious assessment such as submission of writing assignments and answers to reading and listening comprehensions but of course the speaking section is going to cause problems. I have suggested that students record themselves completing tasks and send ,mp3 files to the course tutor. There may be issues here if students do not have the needed software. Of course there is always skype and I am sure this will be a valuable way of communicating with students. Method of submission is an issue as well. Moodle offers assignment pages which allow students to upload documents and then provides a space for teachers to give feedback. Perhaps my reluctance here is something to do with the fact that, as a student, I never used this feature but preferred to email the tutor directly. Perhaps there is little difference in the too as long as appropriate records are kept. Or perhaps as a teacher I will learn why the submissions feature is important and feel obliged to email my tutors and beg forgiveness for my belligerence. One of my concerns regarding attaching an assignment to every unit is the worry that I will create a scroll of death (see LTC moodle) which will be hard for students to navigate. My second concern, or problem, is one of clear instructions and how to direct students from the .pdf document where the assignment is given to them to the relevant page in moodle for submission. I suspect that this is merely semantics and will be worked out fairly easily in the process of course compilation. Although method of instructions generally is an important point to consider as, mentioned above, students may be covering a wide range of abilities so instructions need to be kept to a level of the lowest students.