One the best things I was involved in during my 12 years at the Wayne County Regional Educational Services Agency (Wayne RESA) was a project with the Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC), which I helped found and on whose Board of Directors I served until shortly before my retirement.  The project was a comprehensive professional development series for K-12 educators on how to develop and use “common assessments” (CAD).  It was developed by a team of seven experts from five agencies and in its final form it had 25 modules consisting of PowerPoint presentations with supporting materials and activities.  The modules were then scripted and presented to a pilot group of about 60 educators in a series of workshops.  Based on feedback from the pilot group, revisions were made and the modules were then videotaped and made available through Wayne RESA’s video streaming service.  While these modules have seen the most use in Michigan, they have been used as far away as Alaska.

Wayne RESA recently approached the MAC with an offer to convert the CAD modules into Lectora lessons that would qualify for continuing education credits under newly revised requirements for online learning.  These requirements included the use of assessment items to demonstrate that learners had actually engaged with the content and understood it.  Lectora, on which I had some training before I retired, is an excellent platform for this type of work with the ability to register students, enroll them in lessons, track their progress through a lesson, administer and score test questions, and report the results.  What was missing, and thus what was needed, were the test items.

Kathy, the MAC Executive Director and a member of the CAD project team, contacted the other project team members (including me) to see what we thought and ask if we would be willing to develop the needed items.  The team said “yes,” because that’s the kind of people they are, and the work began.  Today I received items for review for at least six modules from two different team members.  After providing feedback on those items I wrote items for the four modules I had developed and sent them out for review.  A good day’s work, and satisfying to have my head “back in the game” for a few hours.