COMBINING ESR, WEB, AND MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGIES TO LEVERAGE GREATER VALUE FROM ERS QUIZ DEVELOPMENT TIME

An ESR system has been used in large and small geology classes for the past 2 years. During this time, we have melded it with other technologies to produce a system that allows us to: vary quiz function, extend the time and place of quiz use, create a digital quiz library and use individual quizzes in different courses. Normally students interact with ESR quizzes during class. Thus, students who miss class cannot take a quiz. After class, individuals must reconstruct a quiz from memory and cannot use them for exam preparation. To solve these problems, our ESR quizzes are posted in HTML on the class Web site. Now, we are converting them to Flash objects that can be inserted in Web pages and communicate results to a CMS for tracking student progress. This approach makes it easier to use individual quizzes in multiple courses as well as multiple times in a single course. A benefit of Web-ESR fusion is the creation of an online digital quiz library. Whereas we had 3 mineral quizzes in 2003, creation of 3 more in 2004 brought our total to 6. Because class time constraints limit us to 3 quizzes, students can use the “extra” quizzes on the class Web site to prepare for exams. As the library grows, quizzes can be tied to Bloom’s taxonomy and ranked by difficulty by tracking student results. In the future, students will select their quizzes by difficulty and pedagogical goal. Quizzes used in class can be varied from year to year. While the digital quiz library serves multiple courses, it increases greatly the value of our development efforts. Although we cannot document an increase in student learning, we feel the Web-ESR fusion has been successful. In the large physical geology class, overall attendance is much higher than before implementation and ESR data shows attendance remains constant during the semester. Before ESR adoption, it routinely fell below 50 % at the end of the semester. Student evaluations in the spring of 2003 produced positive feedback. On a scale of 1 to 10 (positive), three quarters of the class ranked ESR’s impact on learning as 7 or above in a mid-semester formative assessment. An end of the semester summative assessment found similar results. From an instructor’s viewpoint, packaging ESR quizzes for use in different classes offsets the time required to create effective quizzes. Persistence and availability enhances quiz value for students.