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Case study: Developing the ‘Structure of English’ module site

Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Ellie Rye

Ellie Rye provides an overview of the design and delivery of the VLE site for the Structure of English module, a stage one introductory module taught via a one-hour lecture and a one-hour seminar each week, and assessed via an open piece of coursework between weeks four and seven along with a five hour online exam in the revision and assessment period.

Ellie provided a walkthrough of the module site, describing how it was built using the department Ultra template for consistency of structure and navigation to include:

  • key module information and assessment details provided in specific folders
  • learning modules for each week providing materials and activities related to the lectures and seminars (e.g. preparatory work before seminars and suggested answers afterwards)
  • Summaries of the essential, recommended and background reading material linked through to the module reading list (Leganto)

The discussion board tool was also used to provide an opportunity for Q&A related to each week and to the assignments. There was minimal engagement with these discissions, however, prompting the module team to review future use. Quizzes were also provided drawn from an existing pool of quiz materials. These were made available towards the end of the module for revision purposes. Ellie provided an analysis of quiz usage. Although around half the students engaged with the quizzes there was only a weak positive correlation between the number of quizzes attempted and assessment outcomes. Again this has prompted a review of their use with plans for phased release of quizzes related to the weekly contents.

Responses to the module evaluation suggested satisfaction with the VLE site and online resources.

Watch their presentation:

Structure of English (Panopto viewer) (8 mins 21 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, my name is Ellie Rye. I'm from Language and Linguistic Science. I'm going to be talking about the VLE site for Structure of English, which is one of the modules offered by Language and Linguistic Science in this short presentation. Okay. Um, so first of all, a bit of background about the module. Structure of English is a Stage one module. This module provides an introduction to how English is structured in terms of its sounds, words, sentences and conversations. This year there were 61 students taking the module, and these were mainly students on our English Language and Linguistics degree, for whom the module is compulsory. Every week, students have one x two hour lecture workshop led by academic staff in the department and one x one hour seminar led by a graduate teaching assistant. And the module was assessed by two open assessments - an open piece of coursework assessed between weeks four and seven, and a five hour online exam in the revision and assessment period.

Okay, so the module is structured according to the template we received from the VLE team, um, as edited by Departmental Professional Services staff. So the top of the front page has key module information. And then below that module content is grouped according to teaching weeks. We included pictures in the section and headings and there's a banner to try and make the site look a bit more jazzy. Okay, so this is the structure of English site. We've used a banner which we've also repeated as our module information logo. And then we've got the key information at the top. And below that we've got teaching materials organised by Teaching Week which students can click on to expand. We've grouped everything to do with assessments, for example, in the assessment folder. So students will find all their assessments in this one section of the VLE. Within each week sections, students could find the pages for the weeks lecture seminar preparation, and information about the readings that week. And we also added links to resources discussed in class and a discussion board. On the slide I've shown you here, the section for week one, when students were studying the sounds of English led by Sam Hellmouth, you can see that Sam's added some links for students so they can transcribe sounds using phonetic notation. And we also added discussion boards so students could ask questions about the week's content to the lecturer leading each of the week's topics.

And this is what - so this is what another week looks like from one of the sections I was leading. You can see that we've got a very similar layout. So we've got these documents with the lectures, the readings and seminars, and a discussion board space. And we've also got a revision quiz, which I'll come on to later. Then at the document level, for example, the seminar - students could find or view seminar materials. We used these spaces to post additional materials and suggested answers after class. Okay. So here for example, is the week five seminar document. Students find a quick overview of what the seminar is going to be about. Then the seminar preparation, which students can view online or download. After the seminar we also added an answer key with suggested answers for each, um, for the task. We tried to keep the structure the same each week so that students would know where they would find, um, for example, lecture slides or the suggested answers for the seminar activities.

So I'll finish up by talking about a few of the optional tools we used. Discussion boards and quizzes. So discussion boards weren't generally very well used. I've shown here the number of student posts each week. So you can see that only a handful of students used them each week. And no students posted anything on the discussion boards after week three. Because of this, we didn't include any discussion boards for the final two weeks. Similarly, there was, uh, quite limited engagement with the assessment focussed discussion boards. But this did continue a bit after week three. Um, so the module team will discuss whether we include discussion boards for next year's version of the module, and possibly we'll include them and see where the students engage with them. And then make a decision about what to do in future years.

So we also added some quizzes covering some of the module content. The reasons for only including quizzes for some of the module content were partly to do with the way the teaching and assessment was structured on the module and partly historical. In terms of module and assessment structure, we were able to offer formative covering the first four weeks of the module which covered sounds and how they combine. However, we didn't have time to provide a second formative on the second and third parts of the module, which are one word and sentence structure and then conversation structure. But we did have many quiz questions that have been developed for a discontinued module on word and sentence structure. So we used these existing quiz questions to let students practice analysing word and sentence structure and receive feedback on their answers. Now in 2023-24, because of time pressure, we only released these quizzes at the end of the autumn teaching period. So they were basically available as a revision tool, but only made available in the final week of term.

So here's how one of these quizzes works. In this quiz, we've got 21 questions drawn from a question bank. Students have questions in a variety of formats. So we've got some where there are true or false answers. We've got some where the students have to select the correct answer from a list of possible responses, and some where they have to select the correct answer from a dropdown box. Once students have submitted the quiz, they can view the correct answers and some feedback. Now students seem to have made quite good use of the quizzes, so about half of the students completed some or all of the quizzes for each week's content, and some students made multiple attempts at each quiz. However, they might not actually been very effective as a revision tool. There was a positive correlation between the number of quizzes attempted and the mark on the second assessment, but this was very weak. We'll make some changes next year. We'll release the quizzes in the week they're relevant to, and we'll also review how well the quiz content fits with the module content as we review module content anyway. We'll consider development of quizzes for other sections of the module, but this will depend on whether staff have time to develop new quizzes.

So in summary, we follow the template we were given to ensure consistency of site structure with and between courses. And we thought this would make it easy for students to find material they needed. Overall, as far as we can tell, students were happy with the VLE and other online resources. So 11 students completed the module feedback form, and these 11 students all agreed that the IT resources and facilities, e.g. the VLE, supported their learning. We made use of a couple of optional tools. Use of discussion boards was limited. We'll continue to use these in future as a different cohort may use them more, but we'll keep their use under review. There was better engagement with quizzes, though these might not have helped students with their revision as effectively as hoped. We'll certainly release quizzes earlier in the module next year, and we'll review other aspects of the quizzes, too. Okay. Thank you for watching.