Presenter – Marshall McArthur 麥查理
Chinese Studies Program
University of Houston:
Contact – chalimai@gmail.com 832 922 1450
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have more questions than are listed here. See “feedback” in the toolbar.
Question: What software can I use?
Basically you can use what your school provides; probably a content management system such as Blackboard or Canvas. If you are in a good teaching situation, your organization will have technical staff who can help you with design questions. The University of Houston uses Blackboard, so for all of my language classes that is what I use. To me the best part about Blackboard is that quizzes are integrated into a grade book, which makes it easy to keep track of progress. Some cons of Blackboard are that the interface is not super user-friendly, so you will need to spend a lot of time figuring things out by yourself, with a lot of trial and error. Another con of Blackboard is that if you leave your school, all of that design stays at the school. There are ways to export your work from Blackboard, but into weird files that are only readable by content management systems.
The other option is to find a private software; there are a lot of cloud-based options through subscription service, which means $$$ out of your pocket. For this presentation I used Proprofs.com. They have teacher accounts. I pay about $90 a year, which is pretty reasonable, but they go all the way up to corporate accounts, which are way more than an individual will want to pay. That’s typical of all of the cloud-based options. By the way, they do not list the teacher account in their pricing; you have to phone in and ask for it.
Generally I like Proprofs. They have good chat support; it seems most of the support people are in India and have fake names like Bob, Mary , Ted, and Alice. They allow a lot of question types that I am still exploring such as cloze tests. They have a grade book and allow for class creation, but you are limited to one class if you have a cheap version like I have. I don’t like their audio embed features. Both Blackboard and Proprofs allow question pools (Proprofs calls them question banks). Blackboard’s design is easier for me to use than Proprofs, but I think Proprofs is improving theirs.
If you use Google Classroom, you can probably figure out how to put links for quizzes from Proprofs into your quizzes, but I’m guessing that you end up with multiple windows instead of an embedded audio player inside of the question.
Before you get in too deep
Don’t put the cart before the horse. Think about your curriculum and lesson plans, and what kinds of questions you would use. Design those first; then you can think about question design. As stated above, if your school has support staff to help you that can save a lot of trouble.
Question types:
Please keep in mind that Mai Laoshi is basing this on experience; not on research.
Think about the character recognition questions. Those are designed to answer with fill in the blank. You could also set it up as multiple choice. What’s the difference? For a multiple choice question, the answer is in front of the students, and the incorrect choices are distractors. For fill in the blank, the student must output something, so is more of an active process. To see an example of a multiple choice quiz with embedded audio, please find the “addition” quiz in “Demo Quizzes” in the toolbar.
The same is true for the dictation. If you require students to type the sentences, they are outputting something. If you give them a prep list, they are studying sentences as vocabulary items instead of phrases as vocabulary items.
For sentences, I have decided it is more practical to type pinyin with no tones, instead of requiring tones. That does not mean students don’t learn tones elsewhere, but the chance of students missing a question because of a typo or a single error is much higher when typing the tones. It also allows you to develop a lot of material over time, which students can practice by “clicking a link” and allows for more on-task time.
Character Recognition (again)
For the character recognition quizzes, all of the answers are single syllable, so it’s easy to use fill in the blank and ask students to write numbers for tones. However, as students go up in level, some common characters have more than one pronunciation: 好、乐，不，一。
For these cases it’s easy to provide more than one answer: hao3, hao4, yue4, le4, bu2, bu4 etc.
If you extend the fill in the blank to vocabulary items, just tell the students to follow the book, but substitute numbers for tones. I just give them a list like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y9ni46y3z69gmpq/quizlet_8_numbers_tones.pdf?dl=0
Finally
There are a lot of types of evaluations, and to do these online can provide challenges. Since I teach mostly novice level, I do not do much true “listening comprehension,” mostly dictation. Once you get to a higher level, it’s pretty easy to design quizzes that have an audio file, or a reading text, and multiple choice answers (or dropdown lists). To see a few more types of questions, please find the “Demo Quizzes” link in the main toolbar.