University of Miami - MARE: Multimodal Assignments, Responses, and Evaluations

MARE Workshop Overview

Google Image Search results for "assigning multimodal compositions" on August 19, 2014 9:00 AM

In this workshop, you'll learn more from colleagues than you will from me, but that's as it should be. Many of you are already doing multimodal assignments -- digital assignments where students do more than compose in a word processor a document that could just as well have been composed on a typewriter. Some of you, no doubt, have students write in blog; others perhaps have assignments where students create videos that post to YouTube, or audio assignments that post to SoundCloud, or presentations in Prezi or Wix or Google Sites or Creativist or Medium or . . . well, you get the idea.

So the idea isn't to introduce multimodal composing, to but to see first what folks are doing, and then to see if we can do a bit more.

Central Goal

To create a new, or amend an existing, multimodal assignment which does the following:

• Enriches, if possible, the multimodal assignment. Enrichment may come from adding more multimodal elements (audio to something that only uses images, for example), the scope and purpose of the assignment in the course, or some other change that makes the assignment more central.
• Draft the assignment to meet these three criteria:
1. Makes clear to students how the assignment fits in with and meets course goals.
2. Makes clear to students how the assignment is to be done -- its requirements, resources, procedures, and process.
3. Makes clear to students, if you grade individual assignments, how the assignment will be graded. What criteria, rubric, premise for summative evaluation will be used. Or, if you contract grade or portfolio assess and do not grade individual assignments, makes clear to students how you and they will consider the assignment when coming to the final grade for the course.

Google Image Search results for "assigning multimodal writing" on August 19, 2014, 9:10 AM

Discussion Questions -- We'll Use the Blog Comments to Record Thoughts/Sketch Assignments

What's your next step? What will it take to layer in more to an assignment? How will your students respond to it, to each other in peer review? How will you respond to their work?  And a different question, how will you evaluate it -- both in the economy of the course grade and as an assignment that needs to fit into the ecology of the course goals and outcomes?

These are fun questions, open ended, and premised on the idea that what is doable is possible, given a first step and the joy of experimenting with teaching and learning.