As I continue to explore the online text offered by Atomic Dog publishing, I have found two useful tools that I will describe in this post.
The first tool is called Quick Check. The main idea behind this tool is to encourage students to read through each chapter. For example, one of the first topics in most statistics text books is the idea of visually displaying information. This textbook provides this lesson very early on in the text. My experience has taught me that the UG students I work with tend to pay little attention to this concept at the beginning of the course. I believe Quick Check would be useful as I can add ungraded assessments at the end of each page. I believe adding an ungraded assessment after each section will accomplish a minimum of two things. First, students who glossed over the reading will be encouraged to go back an reread the information. Second, I can pull the results of the Quick Check responses and identify difficult concepts so I may address them in future classes.
The second tool provided in the text is the Quiz function. The fact there is quiz functionality should not be too surprising. However, the instructor has the ability to edit the quiz or add new questions as he or she sees fit. This is especially important in a field like statistics as we tend to use different terms to describe the same concept. For example, the terms outcome variable, dependent variable, and response variable all mean the same thing. If I use one of these terms in class, I can make sure the same term is used in the quizzes. Very cool. This will enable me to use a preexisting tool without having to change my vocabulary or style of teaching. See ya.
Those tools sound quite convenient. Have you used them in class yet, or are they something you plan to use in the future? I wonder about the Quick Check function and if it really does help encourage students to do the reading. I'm not sure how it works. It sounds like it functions as one of those "checks for learning" that we see frequently in textbooks, but that students are expected to complete a quiz. You say it's not graded, but can students by-pass doing the assessment or must they complete it before continueing the reading? How helpful to see what students are struggling with, so you can structure your class time around topics that will most improve learning.
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