From a learner’s perspective, I can confirm that it is more than helpful to know what the criteria for grading an assignment are. This is why instructors should provide assignment briefs that make clear what the assignment is about and what exactly gets graded. It is also helpful to have instructors who are available to clarify any doubts learners might have regarding their assignments. Fortunately, this is a given at the MA programme I study.
In this blog post, I share an experience I had with an assignment and how this experience convinced me that offering a choice can motivate learners to push their limits.
Interested
New semester, new modules. One module was (partly) about creating an e-book or a similar digital artefact. When I read the assignment brief and skimmed through the module outline, I got the impression that this module and the corresponding assignment aimed to teach me how to use an online help authoring tool like MadCap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp. Initially, I was happy with that and interested to learn more about those tools as I use a similar one at work. So, it would be insightful to see how things worked in Flare or RoboHelp.
Reluctant
The instructor communicated to us that there would be a tutorial session on campus. For those who could not attend, a document was provided that listed the steps to get started with MadCap Flare. I skimmed through the material and found myself disoriented as I still got no idea of what kind of tool to expect. This would have been different had I attended the on-campus session: I would have had an impression of how the tool looked like right from the beginning of the tutorial.
So, the assignment remained untouched for a long time for two reasons:
- The text document appeared to be hard to access (in terms of not giving me an idea of what to expect from the tool when trying to do the tutorial).
- As a Mac user, I knew I had to put in some extra effort to make that tool work on my computer. There was just never the right time to deal with that issue.
Subconsciously, I avoided the task and still somehow “waited” for more input like a podcast or similar. (I would have loved to have a short video walkthrough as a teaser. Not the whole tutorial as a video but a video that gives me an idea of what to expect from the tool and how you would work with the tool, especially regarding the key things to use in the assignment. With such insights, I would have felt ready to tackle the text document and actually do the tutorial.)
Averse
In the meantime, my understanding of the module and its assignment evolved:
- It became clear that we did not only have the choice of any help authoring tool (HAT) or component content management system (CCMS) we liked to use, but we literally could use any tool we wanted to create the artefact that was demanded.
- It also turned out that the “digital artefact/eBook” itself did not need to be “an e-book or an interactive HTML object” but also could be a PDF.
This was the moment when my former avoidance turned into refusal. The assignment started to feel random to me as I could not tell anymore what it was actually about. Use any tool to create any digital thing about any topic you like? What would be the learning objectives here, and what would be graded?
At this moment I just wanted to get it done in the easiest and fastest way possible. I was ready to open Adobe InDesign and put together a PDF with it. But then again, this already bored me from the beginning rather than easing my frustration of what I perceived a waste of time at that moment.
Interested again
Even so, I started to search a bit for tools other than MadCap Flare or RoboHelp that would let me publish an e-book (i.e., EPUB file format). I came across some static site generators that could do that and got interested. Static site generators are widely used for API documentation, and I used such a tool before (see my recent blog post on using the static site generator MkDocs for documentation purposes). Moreover, I would love to get to know more tools of this kind and find out how they worked.
That moment was another turning point: I decided to take advantage of the openness of the assignment and set my own learning objectives. Although this will end up being way more time-consuming than putting together a PDF file via Adobe InDesign, I am looking forward to getting the assignment done by trying something new. Something new that also will help me to improve in the field I am most interested in at the moment.
To conclude, frustration is probably just part of everybody’s learning journey. But being presented with choices is a blessing as learners might use it to refine their learning according to their wishes and needs. In so doing, learners would willingly push their limits.
API docs and me 