Instructor Guide for Forecasting Activity:
The advanced version of the forecasting activity has been designed in such a way that instructors can create their own versions of the exercise for use by there students. The setup involved for adding your class is minimal. The bulk of the work has allready been completed by the PALS stafff. When your students work through the exercise, their results will be mailed to you. The multiple choice questions are allready graded and the text response questions are emailed back to you.
In order to register your class, you must first sign your class up. This involves creating a class, entering instructor information and then password protecting your information. Once you have successfully signed up, you can log in to "ClassAdmin" and then customize the exercise to meet your needs. The minimal amount of customization involves releasing pre-prepared cases to the public.
Once you have successfully created a class and customized the exercise, you can then point your students to an URL which will then allow them to work through cases that you have released.
Currently, we recommend that you do not grade your students on how well they work the exercise, but rather that they did the exercise. The exercise is designed for failure based learning, so missing questions may be benificial in the long run.
Feedback from early use of this exercise has been positive. Students liked the replicatable functionality of the exercise, where they could work cases many times.( Students liked the exercise because they could work through a case, learn from their mistakes and try a new case. ) Instructors like the exercise, since it gives students valuable forecasting experience with very little work done by the instructor.