LearningSpace: Key to the Future
(cont. from pg 1)
Who We Are: Profiles
How can students from 28 schools from around the country get to know each
other in the virtual classroom? The Profiles database provides the way.
Students can tell each other where they're from, what their interests are,
and even provide a picture of themselves.
What Do You Know: The Assessment Manager
This module provides built-in, automatic assessments, grading, and grade
book maintenance to assist teachers in appraising their
students'performance. Assessment isn't limited to simple test grading, it
also allows teachers to evaluate the value of discussion participation,
teamwork involvement, and students'progress on work assignments.
The Assessment Manager also provides for other useful tools including the
survey, popular with teachers for assorted purposes. Some use surveys to
gather information about students, ask their opinions about specific
points, or to just ask how things are going, encouraging feedback that
they'd normally be able to judge by being in the classroom.
Easy to Start
A course designed in LearningSpace and presented over the Web doesn't
require students to possess special technical skills. They need little more
than a basic understanding of how to click on links in a Web browser, a
skill many already know or can readily learn in a single sitting. Once into
their course site, they are welcomed with a graphical page of module
choices, with an inviting "Start Here" icon, making it clear exactly how
and where to begin. This action takes students into the Schedule module,
which uses either the outline format or a graphical calendar.
Getting Around and Back Again
LearningSpace is easy to use and move around in. Assignments can contain
links that take students to multimedia in the MediaCenter, into an on-going
discussion in the CourseRoom, or into a new work document. A constant
feature of all the modules is a navigator that displays a bar of icons that
allow students to easily move from one module to another, and views to sort
and select by.
On top of that, each module has its own distinct color that appears within
all documents.
Helping Out
LearningSpace comes with a terrific on-line Help, and teachers can also add
to it, customizing it specifically to their course. This gives students the
special feeling that the Help they read is designed specifically for them,
and isn't straight out of the box.
LearningSpace has proven to be a powerful medium for offering courses over
the Internet. It's tools and framework are at the same time flexible and
comprehensive.
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