Session 4: From challenge to change

Recommendations for technology-enhanced practices – Practitioners

Using the Typology of Technology Use in Assessment and Feedback, the Challenge to Change cards and/or your own experience, recommend to your teaching colleagues ways in which they might use technology to enhance assessment and feedback.

• Moving from individual assignments to assessed group work with the use of wikis for collaboration (especially powerful for distance students)

• Peer assessment using WebPA or peer marking from Turnitin

• Using an e-portfolio / blog to support a video diary that records reflections at each stage of an assignment

• Explore simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life®

• Create assessments that occur over time online eg wikis, blogs, forums. These allow teachers to monitor progress, offer formative and summative feedback. These methods provide a richer picture of student learning and a more fluid type of feedback.

• Consider a variety of assessments to keep students engaged and to allow for different learning styles.

• Use the production of an ‘e-assessment’ as an opportunity to reflect on the underlying pedagogy both of the assessment and the course a s a whole.

NB

• Don’t let the tool dictate the assessment.

• Practitioners should be sufficiently trained and familiar with any technology being used in an assessment. Sufficient time should be allowed to develop the appropriate skills.

• iSpringfree is a very good PowerPoint to Flash conversion program (www.ispringsolutions.com); Adobe® Captivate® (www.adobe.com/products/captivate) enables you to add interactive simulations, branching scenarios and quizzes

Recommendations for technology-enhanced practices – Learners

Using the Typology of Technology Use in Assessment and Feedback, the Challenge to Change cards and/or your own experience, recommend to your teaching tutors ways in which they could enhance assessment and feedback with technology.

• Use video in scenario-based clinical assessment skills.

• Audio feedback to accompany work that has been marked makes feedback more meaningful and personalised. Very good for delivery to mobiles and via RSS feeds. It’s also more effective as feedback.

• From a learner’s perspective, scenario-based simulations foster good self-assessment and deeper learning – highly recommended at levels 6 and 7.

NB

Avoid over burdening learners with complex technology-based models of feedback that are difficult to enforce and implement.

Recommendations for technology-enhanced practices – Curriculum managers

Using the Typology of Technology Use in Assessment and Feedback, the Challenge to Change cards and/or your own experience, as curriculum managers/course leaders recommend to your senior managers ways in which institutional approaches to assessment and feedback could be enhanced with technology.

• Identify and share/showcase good practice in the use of technology eg via a festival. You could also set up an institutional online community blog

• Provide protected development time plus an expectation that all staff should engage in advancing their professional practice in learning and teaching

• Ensure the right IT infrastructure and support are in place

• Start with curriculum needs and outcomes. Select appropriate technologies to enhance learning and teaching rather than promoting technology for technology’s sake

• Set up pilots that are rigorous and ensure prerequisite testing is in place for the subject discipline concerned

• Consider the adaptive potential of computer-assisted assessment – use this to improve student engagement and retention and improve cost effectiveness by identifying student support needs

• Build up evidence of good practice and share it via blogs and wikis

• Use integrated centrally supported systems. Strategic decisions needed on the right systems to use and support.

NB

Training is needed for staff and students in the use of any system used in assessment.