I’ve been thinking of ways to include worked examples and hints in Blackboard VLE quizzes. Cognitive Load theory has something called the Worked Example effect, whereby learners who receive direct instruction in the form of worked examples perform better than those who don’t. The reason is attributed to providing novice learners with an approach to solving a problem that they can replicate, thus alleviating the working memory load while solving a problem. There’s some more on worked examples here.
The question then was how to provide a worked example (or a hint, a slightly less informative way to guide students) in Blackboard quizzes. I want to have them at the point where students can click on them as they need them, rather than having to leave the quiz and go off somewhere else to get help. I did this in this trial with Javascript buttons. The video below goes through how it looks and the mechanics of it.
Nice work Michael. Do you know if the same technique works in Blackboard 9.1? From your screencast, it looks like you are using webct.
Thanks Sharon – I don’t (I will in September!) – we have Blackboard 8.1CE I think, or whatever the Blackboard-WebCT hybrid is. I’d hope that as I am only editing effectively the html “body” of the question text, I assume the idea should transfer, once you can edit that in BB9 – i.e. that space where you enter the question allows for html code. A slightly more clunky version if not would be to have a weblink to another page with worked example information on that.