Instructional Design Portfolio
This Page: Creative Quizzes | Interface Design | Technical Documentation | Linguistic Games
Creative Online Quizzes
Quick CSS Self-Check Quiz
If you're like me and don't have enough time or Javascript to program a self-check quiz, you can use CSS rollovers to hide and reveal answers as needed.
I implemented this in the TLT Teaching with Databases site (scroll to bottom of page).
A Quiz Becomes a Rubric
For an information literacy exercise, students in a nutrition class were asked to find nutritional web sites then evaluate them for credibility based on a number of criteria.
Instead of asking students to submit a report, a "quiz" was created in which students filled in answers for a set of guided questions. The instructor was able to hand grade a consistent set of responses and assign points for each part. Since the maximum points were given for each questions, students knew exactly what counted and the instructor no longer had to "remember" what the maximum score for each section was. See the sample dummy quiz below
Web Site Rating Worksheet Quiz Example
Fill in the information for the nutrition Web site you found.
Practice Foreign Language Accents
Classes like Spanish and French require students to type non-English characters like ñ, é, ç and so forth. To give students some automatically practice, I suggested a quiz in which all you had to type a give word with an accent.
The quiz gives instant feedback and can allow instructors to know whether students have been practicing their accents or not. No more excuses of "you never told us how to type accents." See the sample dummy quiz below.
Practice Accent Quiz Example
Type in the word as written to practice your accents.
Note: Text in form boxes are sample answers.
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Interface Design
Below are some samples of screens I have designed or provided usability input for.
Online Forms and Screens
Course Contest Entry Form
This is a form designed for students to nominate courses they liked using our course management system. It's a pretty simple screen, but we were able to extract some very beneficial data from the students and had very few questions about how to fill out the form. Plus I got to explore style sheets for forms.
Celtling Directory Form
Another fairly simple form to submit a directory entry for a Listserv. You'll notice that I'm very fond of checkboxes to restrict users to certain parameters.
Tech Support Pages
Spanish Technology Student Help
A set of help pages orignally designed for a Spanish course using technology components. Spanish Department logo by Jason Jolley
ANGEL Course Managament Help Pages
Before: A very text heavy site with many intermediate links.
After: Reorganized into a categorized list of direct links to keywords.
FileMaker Screens
One of my all-time favorite tools is FileMaker, partly because it's fairly simple to develop a clean interface very quickly. Here are sample pages from my FileMaker databases
Searchable Bibliography
Another search screen, but it includes function buttons for navigation and groups categories of fields together.
Color Code Viewer
A Filemaker application in which you enter a hexadecimal color code and see it's decimal equivalents and a color sample against different backgrounds.
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Technical Documentation
A very important aspect of online education is telling instructors and students how to "work the system." Here is but a small sample of technical documentation I have written over the years.
Linguistic Games
Mysteries of Morphology
This is a fill-in-the blank quiz, but if it's Halloween and you toss candy at students with winning answers, they become a little more motivated.
Match the Name Ice Breaker
To teach scripts and phonology, I put students names in multiple scripts then made students draw name from a hat. After a little tutorial on each name, then had to guess whose name they got.
Sociolinguistics in Real Life
These are Threaded discussion topics, but these are some "scenarios" which students responded to positively
- Find a TV show or movie in which accents are used to convey a humorous or clichéd stereotype.
- Discuss the discourse strategies you would use with roomates you suspected of "dipping" into your special stash of homemade fudge.
Humorous Phonetic Transcription
Not an original idea, but a popular one in class. To practice reading transcription, I have students "translate" a set of amusing sentences such as a a Top 10 list. Here's an example Top 10 list on the theme of instructional design
Note: Phonetic transcriptions are in Unicode.
| Phonetic | English Translation |
|---|---|
| /ɪnstɛnt mɛsɨdʒɪŋ minz ju kæn bi fawnd ɛnitajm, ɛniwer/ | Instant messaging means you can be found anytime, anywhere |
| /əmr̩dʒn̩si θri awr̩ kanfrɛns kalz/ | Emergency three hour conference calls |
| /spanteniəs yus əv dʒarɡn̩ layk modælɨDi, taym ɔn tæsk ænd lr̩nɪŋ kəmyunɨDi/ | Spontaneous use of jargon like "modality", "time on task" and "learning community" |
| /dɪskəvr̩ɪŋ jur tul kræʃɨz ɪn ðə nu vr̩ʒn̩ əv ðə brawzr̩/ | Discovering your tool crashes in the new version of the browser |
| /sʌmwən ɛls hæz alrɛdi dən ɪt, bʌt ɪts nat kəmpæDɨbl̩ wɪθ jur sɪstɛm/ | Someone else has already done it, but it's not compatible with your system |
| /ɪt dʌzn̩t wr̩k ɔn ə mæk/ | It doesn't work on a Mac |
| /ɪt onli wr̩ks ɔn ə mæk/ | It only works on a Mac |
| /wʌns ju ɡɛt ə læptap, ju hæv tu fɪɡjr̩ awt haw tu hʊk ɪt ʌp tu ðə prodʒɛktr̩/ | Once you get a laptop, you have figure out who to hook it up to the projecter. |
| /so mɛni saftwer pækɨdʒɨz, so lɪDl̩ tajm/ | So many software packages, so little time |
| /pipl̩ əkspɛkt ju tu no wat jur talkɪnɡ əbawt/ | People expect you to know what you're talking about |