App Exercises

How does AEs work in practice?

The principle behind Application Exercises is that students work in teams to solve application problems that allow them to apply and expand on the knowledge they have just learned (in the iRAT & tRAT). They must arrive at collective response to the application questions and display their answer choice in an gallery walk in the classroom. Lecturers then facilitate a discussion or debate among teams to consider the possible solutions to the application problem.

So students are to solve problems applying the previously acquired knowledge/skill. Once the students have a solution, then they publicly disclose their answer to the rest of the class and the lecture

How do I create an AE for my TBL lesson?

The best and easiest way to create a TBL lesson in LAMS is to use the TBL Design Wizard. You can also create AEs manually too if you prefer to customise it further.

How do AEs look like to students?

Well, there are different types of LAMS activites and tools that can be used as Application Exercises that the AEs section on the TBL Student Guide.

What activities can I use for AEs?

Lots!

Typical TBL requires an assessment based activity. Therefore you can use the Assessment activity. But in LAMS there are plenty of other assessment and collaborative activities that you can use for AEs. Some examples are:

Mindmap Students can create diagrams for representing tasks, words, concepts, or items linked to and arranged around a central concept.
Submit assignment Students can submit file based work that they might do off-line and represents the output of their team collaboration.
Vote A poll where students agree on an team decided option and submit it.
Q&A Ask students a question and students need to come up with a consensuated answer as a team.
doKu A fabulous document collaboration tool that all members of the team can use to create a collaborative document response. Ideal for cases studies.
Whiteboard Students can collaboratively draw and create visually creative responses used a blank canvas or a pre-existing drawing.

After student submit their answer/response to any of the above activities, you -as teacher, can simultaneously share their answer or enter a Gallery Walk.

What kind of question types or activities can I use for AEs?

Usually for TBL, you would use the Assessment activity or doKu, depending on the type of AE you need.

The Assessment activity will give you a full assessment options including a large variety of question type options:

MCQ (single or multiple correct answers)
Matching pairs
Very short answers
Numerical
True/False
Essays
Ordering
Mark hedging (confidence based testing)

The doKu activity work best when you want the students to respond to a case or a use case you give them collaboratively. doKu allows the students to simultaneously edit a document that will end up being their response to the case you gave them.

But you aren't limited to Assessment and doKu activities, you can also use the Voting, Q&A , Mindmaps and Submit files activities.

Can I get more than one team leader to respond?

Technically for TBL, only one person takes the role of leader that answers on behalf of the team. But at times you might want to have more than one individual to contribute to the answer. Specially when it's a collaborative response.

If you want multiple students to contribute to a document answer or assignment response, use the doKu tool.

Yes. In TBL terms, they call these a Gallery Walks. And you can do Gallery Walks with both Assessments and doKu activities

How do I use gallery walks and/or simultaneous release?

When using AEs based on the Assessment activity

Creating the AE with Assessment

If you created your TBL design using the TBL Design Wizard, then there's nothing else you need to do as it is all preconfigured for you -that's the beauty of the wizard!

However, if you want to do this manually, make sure that when you are creating/editing your Assessment activity for you AE, you enable the option "Disclose learner's and other groups' answers" when authoring your assessment

During the lesson

When you are running the lesson, as you enabled the option for "Disclose learner's and other groups' answers", once the teams have finished answering the questions, you are able to simultaneously disclose the answers depending on the question type.

For MCQ questions, there's a two step disclose. You can disclose the teams' answers first. Then facilitate an intra-team discussion where each team might defend their choice and once they correct answer might be apparent to the class, then disclose the correct answer.

The tabs below shows how the answers are disclosed to students. The first time displays the first stage (just disclose the teams answer). After which, a discussion between teams is encourage. Once the discussion is over -you can disclose the correct answer (see tab 2).

The disclosure of MCQs can be done question by question or all questions at once (see "Disclose All..." buttons above). Up to your preference.

For essay responses, you can disclose the answers at once and follow up with the team's defence of their response.

When using AEs based on the doKu activity

When using doKus you can use Gallery Walks.

Gallery Walks are classroom-based active learning technique where students are encouraged to build on their knowledge about a topic by interacting with other students.

In a classroom setup, students are able to explore different “works” that are placed around the classroom (stations). At each station, the students interact with the work and learn by asking questions to other peers.

In the context of doKu, when students or their teams finish their document, the teacher starts the Gallery Walks which then allows all of the students to see other teams' documents.

Students then are able to review, provide comments and rate each other’s work.

Creating the AE with doKU

When you start the Gallery Walk in the lesson, the instructions on how to conduct the review are displayed to the students. These are the instructions that you can include in the “Instructions for Gallery Walk” shown above.

If you just want the student to see each other’s work but do not want them to do comments and/or ratings (read-only), then make sure you set the “Disable commentary and rating”.

During the lesson, when teams have submitted their responses, you can disclose their answers to the rest of the class.

During the lesson

Starting Gallery Walk

When you are in the lesson, you can view how students are collaborating live in the document. Whenever you want to start the Gallery walk, you just need to press the "Start Gallery Walk" button and students will then be able to see the

Starting Gallery Walk:

Finishing Gallery Walk

Just like before, you are able to see how students are adding commentaries to each others' documents and see their ratings. Once you feel that the Gallery walk should be over, click on the "Finish Gallery Walk" button and students will be able to see the summary of all ratings as well as the commentary left from all teams to their document.

Can I get students to reflect on their AE work?

After the AEs are completed, it is important to get students to quickly write down some key learning points as research shows that this writing help students with long term knowledge retention.

If you use the TBL Design Wizard, then a reflection activity after all the AEs is added be default. Otherwise, you can add a Notebook activity and add reflection points for the students to considered when writing their own key learning points.

How do I assign score/marks weight to AEs?

See Grades weights.

Can I set up a time limit for the teams to complete their AEs?

Yes, and there are three types of time limits to better suit your teaching:

1) Everyone gets the same amount of time to complete the AEs

When you set up a this time limit, then each individual team get a pre-determined number of minutes to complete the exam from the moment they start the AEs (say 10 minutes). The time starts to countdown from the moment that the student begins the AEs, so in our example, everyone gets 10 minutes regardless which date they start. You can set this up when authoring the AEs or in Monitor as follows:

This option is ideal if you are planning to run your TBL lesson asynchronously.

2) Hard time limits

When you are running a synchronous AEs -when all the students are doing the AEs at the same time -whether this is online or face-to-face in the classroom, you might want to set a hard deadline for it (ie: ‘Let’s get everyone to finish the assessment in 2 minutes’).

Unlike the relative time limit before, now you are able to set a hard deadline in minutes.

🤔 Tip: To better know how much time left the student might need, you can take a look at the students’ progression in the assessment. If about half of the students have already completed the assessment, you might want to add just two more minutes for the rest to complete it.

Once the time expires, all student responses will be saved up until the point when the time expires and the assessment will automatically be completed.

However, sometimes a student might have arrived late, so you might need to grant exceptions…

3) Time extension

In these cases, you can grant a particular student or team (in the case the assessment is to be performed as a team).

These extensions are additions to the previous two time limits.

For instance if you are have given all students 10 minutes from their relative start of the AEs, you can grant a single student (or group) an extra 10 minutes (adding a total of 20 minutes) to finish the assessment.

If you have set up a hard time limit, then you can grant a student an extra number of minutes for him/her to complete the AEs.

These time extensions provide a very powerful tool to manage time limits for students with special needs that might require extra time to complete an assessment.

⏲️ More info on LAMS' time management for assessments.

Can I export AEs grades?

Yes.

This is how you do it if you are using the Assessment tool as your AE

If you are using other tools like Mindmaps, doKu, Q&A, etc.. go to their monitoring view and look for the export button.

Can I use AEs to teach coding?

Certainly!

Using Essay question types, you can add the ability for students to use a proper integrated development environment (IDE). Students' can write code using proper syntax and code highlighting.

Once you enable code highlighting for the essay questions, student will be able to enter code just as they type it in their IDEs