Assesslog

So we’re looking at e-assessment this week – hurrah!!

Our ‘homework’ was to watch this programme from Teachers TV http://www.teachers.tv/video/5431, which gave several examples of innovative technology-enabled assessment practices.

Overall I felt that this gave a particularly balanced view of e-assessment; a clear picture of the benefits but also a word of warning about how challenging it is to gain credibility and trust for these new assessment practices within society – and I imagine that this, in addition to a lack of functional connections between educators and programmers/technologists, is one of the primary reasons why things have moved on so very little from when this programme was first broadcast nearly three years ago. How exactly do we overcome the natural conservatism among generations who’ve been through paper-based examination systems, and accusations of ‘dumbing down’ and ‘cheating’? I’m personally facing these very issues as I type, since creating a VLE for an electrical engineering DL programme that’s holding on to very traditional assessment methods. As expected, the students are using the discussion forums to ask for and give help on the sample test questions – a system that seems to be working beautifully, and the immediate uptake with little staff encouragement has proved that the students felt there was definitely a need here. However, staff are concerned that, as the students are now ‘talking to each other’, that they’ll be able to ‘cheat’ on the summative tests, which are effectively open-book pen-and-paper exams. In solving one big problem through technology – student isolation – we’ve created another. Whether this makes the old assessment method significantly less reliable or valid than it was before is uncertain, but if the programme team wish to keep using this assessment method, it may be worthwhile using a system that creates personalised tests, similar to the primary maths tests used as an example in the Teachers TV programme. Mark Russell at the University of Hertfordshire has been using a similar system for frequent low-stakes formative assessment in higher-level Engineering courses that he developed several years ago. I invited Mark in recently to demo his system to our programme team, who were quite interested. However, I still feel that there is a fair amount of inertia to overcome, in that the team needs to see a working product before they consider giving it a go. Am I, with my natural & social sciences background, capable of setting up a personalised assessment programme for an M-level electrical engineering unit? I guess, working in the Engineering faculty, I’m bound to be able to find someone who can give me a hand..!

There were plenty more issues raised in the programme that were relevant to what we’ve already covered in the assessment unit, and also to my own experience – see the next post!