I'd love to hear how you feel it went, now that the semester is over. Did removing all deadlines result in a flood of work submitted at the end of the semester?
There was not a flood of work at the end. But on the other hand, I was pretty aggressive about constantly mentioning that people needed to get to work on things, and letting people know about the one big deadline at the end of the semester. And I still had a sizeable bump in the grading queue right after that one big deadline, and the quality wasn't great. (A lot of people who were ignoring my "nudges" and started putting up half-court shots at the buzzer hoping one of them would go in.) But I think I would rather have this, than people constantly playing games with deadlines.
Having just one level of mastery really helped simplify things. Cutting back on the number of Core skills gave me the justification I needed for insisting on mastering all six -- not five out of six but ALL SIX. And I honest had forgotten all about tokens until I reviewed this article just now; if you don't have deadlines you really don't need tokens, I think.
In the end the course was OK. Just OK. And the just-OK-ness of the course was the result of an enormous amount of adjustments that I was making on a near-daily basis; had I not collected data and made those adjustments, it would have been significantly worse than just OK. I am giving myself some distance right now from all work related things but at some point I may do a proper post-mortem.
Have you already written somewhere (and I missed it) about how you track the completion of a learning target? especially when your later checkpoints track several targets?
I'd love to hear how you feel it went, now that the semester is over. Did removing all deadlines result in a flood of work submitted at the end of the semester?
There was not a flood of work at the end. But on the other hand, I was pretty aggressive about constantly mentioning that people needed to get to work on things, and letting people know about the one big deadline at the end of the semester. And I still had a sizeable bump in the grading queue right after that one big deadline, and the quality wasn't great. (A lot of people who were ignoring my "nudges" and started putting up half-court shots at the buzzer hoping one of them would go in.) But I think I would rather have this, than people constantly playing games with deadlines.
Having just one level of mastery really helped simplify things. Cutting back on the number of Core skills gave me the justification I needed for insisting on mastering all six -- not five out of six but ALL SIX. And I honest had forgotten all about tokens until I reviewed this article just now; if you don't have deadlines you really don't need tokens, I think.
In the end the course was OK. Just OK. And the just-OK-ness of the course was the result of an enormous amount of adjustments that I was making on a near-daily basis; had I not collected data and made those adjustments, it would have been significantly worse than just OK. I am giving myself some distance right now from all work related things but at some point I may do a proper post-mortem.
Have you already written somewhere (and I missed it) about how you track the completion of a learning target? especially when your later checkpoints track several targets?
Each target is graded separately, and the mark is either "Success" or "Retry". The number of successful attempts is what's recorded in the LMS.