TellEli10_4_EduSpace

Raymond Cepko

As some of you know, I used the Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA), Eduspace, which was bundled with the Ann Raimes’ book “Keys for Writers” this semester in my Research, Writing, and Grammar course for level V. Like many of you who use Nicenet yet are unhappy with its limited functionality, I was, at final, enthusiastic about using a new ICA that provided more functionality -- more bells and whistles if you wish. As Eduspace is based on Blackboard technology, this seemed to be the perfect choice. My experience with Eduspace, highlighting two functions of this ICA -- the communication and course materials sections, follows.

Just like Nicenet, Eduspace has an asynchronous conferencing/discussion board section that is very useful for a class. Unlike Nicenet, Eduspace’s discussion board allows students to attach a document or an external link to their conferencing posting. It also has a useful spell-check feature and allows use ofrich text, plain text, or html for those students who like to be more creative. One activity that I had my students do with the discussion board was to post their annotated bibliographies of sources that they planned on using in their papers along with the original document. This then enabled their partner to read the annotation and the source and make comments.

Another additional feature of Eduspace communication section is a synchronous chat option that I was very interested in using. Unfortunately, because many of my students had conflicting schedules or did not have Internet access from home, I never had the opportunity to use it.

In the course materials section, Eduspace has plenty of pre-designed assignments that students can work on if they have a specific grammar problem; there are also tests that match the grammar points covered in Keys to assess students’ progress. This was a nice option because it gave me as an instructor more flexibility and the ability to address the individual needs of my students. I did not have to use a lot of class time to cover grammar problems, especially when they were not a common issue for the rest of the class. Instead, I assigned individual work to my students. However, this feature of Eduspace had its own drawback: because of the number of grammar points covered and quizzes available, students often had problems navigating through this section. In my class, this resulted in some students taking the wrong quiz or completing the assignments but not the quizzes.

Another problem with the quizzes was they were usually multiple-choice and asked the students to find the one grammatically incorrect or correct sentence from a choice of four. While this may not be the ideal way to check grammar rule acquisition because of lack of production, it was made worse by the number of the quizzes with errors. Fortunately, Eduspace allows the instructor to modify the pre-set quizzes, so I could edit the quizzes. In addition to the quizzes, Eduspace also has numerous writing assignments from various genres that are also adaptable to fit your own writing assignments, a feature which I found useful.

Overall, I think the biggest problem that an instructor can face with Eduspace is the fact that this pre-built ICA tries to do too much and thus is rather difficult to navigate through at first; it takes time to get comfortable using it. In my case, more than half of the semester was over before my class and I got more or less comfortable with the main functions. This did not leave us an ample time to further explore the potentials that Eduspace had to offer. While there is a tutorial for the instructor which presents all of the ICA functionality, if you, are the type of person who needs to actually use a new piece of software to fully appreciate its potential, make sure to start exploring and building your class ahead of time – well before the semester has started. If you will be teaching students that have not had the experience working with ICA that offers a wider variety of tools and functions, start small and introduce them to the new functions gradually in order to avoid frustration and confusion.