If you have opinions about SPARK, the University’s online learning management system, OIT wants to hear them.
Over Spring Break, Academic Computing hosted a SPARK Focus Group to receive feedback from professors currently using SPARK in their courses. Here’s what we wanted to find out:
- Why do faculty use SPARK and how does it enrich their teaching?
- Which tools do faculty rely on and which tools do they ignore?
- What are the problems, quirks, and questions they have about SPARK?
- What’s their wish list for the future?
The participating faculty members value SPARK’s capability to securely host course content, handouts, student email, assignments, and quizzes in one place. As an alternative to a course website, SPARK allows professors to enhance their course content with additional readings, web links, and video, all while reducing the expense and waste of paper. And SPARK’s interactive features, such as Assessments, Assignments, and Chat, enable students to participate in the course and turn in assignments on schedule even if they must be absent from class.
So what are some things faculty wanted to change? Participants wished for a more streamlined user interface in which multiple tasks could be accomplished simultaneously with as few clicks as possible. They’d like SPARK to be better and more intuitively integrated with other services, including UMass Online, Opscan, OWL, and “Web 2.0” tools. Their wish list included improvements to the Gradebook and student tracking, a wiki feature, and a student presentation feature.
What do you find valuable about SPARK? What’s on your wish list? We’re working on a survey that will be available soon.