Hi,
As I wrote elsewhere
<https://flxlexblog.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/active-learning-strategies-for-bioinformatics-teaching-2/>
(thanks to Greg for mentioning this post on the SWC blog), for collecting
answers to the multiple choice questions I ask during the workshops I teach, I
use a very simple google form with no question-text, and four answers: ‘option
1, option 2, option 3, option 4’. The ‘summary of responses’ option from google
allows me to show students the tally of responses. For the second round of
voting, and for each next question, I simply delete all responses.
The reason I am doing this is that it saves me from having to enter all
possible questions in forms, and gives me the flexibility to decide on the spot
which question from the available set I ask (in one case I had prepared a slide
for each question in the unix lesson, in another I simply used the projector to
show the question from the SWC unix lesson page in the browser). This works
very well as an instructor and is easy enough to do. One tip: don’t show the
tally before everyone has answered (use a separate laptop/tablet for yourself,
or freeze the projectorscreen while you check the responses).
One drawback is that I loose all votes for future reference (ie. figuring out
which question was too say or too hard)[1].
I can’t help thinking, though, that in 2015 we should be able to do this in a
better way. I have for a long time hoped for a markdown-based questionnaire
system: write questions in markdown, and render these into an online form for
collecting answers, coupled with a way to retrieve all answers in text files.
This would make it much easier to reorganise/reuse questions, and would allow
version control/diff/pull requests. Does anyone know whether there is such a
software?
If not, could this be an SWC-inspired coding project? We would really be helped
by a system that pulls the questions from the instructor’s clone of the lesson
material repo and auto-generates forms for each workshop. Maybe a long shot,
but I though it worth asking.
Lex
[1] Well, in fact, even after resetting the responses, you can still see all
answers in the underlying google spreadsheet, and use the timestamps to reverse
engineer which question you asked for which set of ansers. Or take screenshots
along the way. Still, rather impractical...
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