The act of invoicing
TIPPINST -- We are exploring ways to give 24-hour legs to our recent acquistion of Acrobat 7 Professional. When we use taxpayer funding to purchase commercial items like the €240 upgrade to Acrobat Writer, we must leverage the purchase to ensure it has the greatest utility. This best practise imperative caused us to convert selected project tracking documents from Word format to Acrobat format. Students can make comments on the Acrobat documents using Adobe Reader. They don't need Acrobat Writer.
Most significantly, students can add the comments while at home with their free copies of Acrobat Reader. This effectively doubles the time in use of products generated through Acrobat 7 because they work well outiside of the classroom.
These student-edited project documents normally equate to a value of at least 10% in the continuous assessment scheme. Consequently, they're read carefully. To earn full marks, students use the Acrobat files as the basis for an invoice for academic credit. They edit their PDF document and then upload it to Moodle where further evaluation results in course credit. We have discovered that the act of invoicing encourages a sense of closure. It also injects a rudimentary entrepreneurial perspective into an academic task. The pedagogical merit of this approach has generated lively discussion, including cross-talk on some Irishblogs.
The Tipperary Institute Skunkworks forms part of the Clonmel campus. Moodle is an Open Source Virtual Learning Environment.
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