Collaborative Teaching is one of the biggest challenges for the OLCC model. Who is the teacher? The lecturer? The facilitator? This post will focus on issues with student grading.
At first this may seem trivial and the intial answer is usually the "lecturer", but on deeper thought, it becomes the facilitator. Why? Well, you need to ask the student, and once the grades start coming it, it is clear. The student's answer is the person who awards the grade. That is the person who is ultimately responsible for the curriculum content, and that is the institution's instructor of record. But under the OLCC model, that is not the person who delivers the curriculum content.
This is why it is so important that lecturers and facilitators collaboratively develop the curriculum content. The general idea is the lecturer develops the "core lesson module", which is then distributed to multiple facilitators, and they make suggestions for derivitive narrow focused TLOs. This allows the core module to be taught from multiple angles with variance in focus. But this does not approach, how does the facilitator award the grade?
Here are some thoughts.
- Make projects not exams. The projects can encompas elements of multiple modules. Ideal projects would have a purpose, some form of utility. For example, during the 2004 chemical hygienics OLCC, http://science.widener.edu/svb/olcc_safety/ , students at UALR picked a procedure they used in their lab and wrote an SOP (Standard/Safe Operating Procedure) for that process.
- Library resources: A spreadsheet could be generated out of http://chemistry.sla.org/wp-content/uploads/cheminfolit.pdf and students could go to their school library and identify which resources were available. That would allow the course to survey resources of the schools, which could be of value. Then students could identify one resource that would be of value to their research, and create a tutorial on how to use it. That in turn could be submitted to XCITR, and reviewed through the XCITR process.