Group Admins
Description
This interactive presentation seeks to show how students and academics alike can empower their practice through the use of technologies in co-creative assessment. Over the past few decades, Higher Education Institutions have been making concerted efforts and building detailed strategies to empower the student body to have a louder, more potent, voice in order to influence and impact all areas of student life. In turn, this has led to an advancing interest in the role of students in pedagogy with key concepts, such as ‘co-creation’, ‘students as producers’ and ‘students as partners’ being defined, developed and delivered from this culture shift. Projects and approaches thus far have focused on pastoral activities, teaching evaluation, course design and learning technology, however the empowerment of students in creation of summative assessment, and particularly how learning technology can drive this co-creation, is currently an under researched field (Deeley and Bovill, 2015) and it is within this area that this presentation centres itself.
Ryan and Tilbury (2013) offer the idea of ‘learner empowerment’ as addressing “the challenge of changing the basis for interaction between educator and learner, to involve students more actively in the process of learning”. Co-created assessment can be a troublesome and risk-laden for academics but its results have been found to be transformative (Cook-Sather, 2014), empowering (Deeley and Bovill, 2015) and ‘effectively equip [students] for a lifetime of assessing their own learning’ (Boud and Falchikov, 2006). Using technology to facilitate co-creation “sits well with the understanding of learning as socially constructed” and it has been argued that “it is incumbent on teachers to embrace such tools where their use is beneficial to learners and teachers alike” (Duffy and Bruns, 2006).
This presentation will describe a small piece of action research which used student response systems, a virtual learning environment, synchronous word processing software, and video-conferencing technology to facilitate the co-creation of a post-graduate summative assessment on a blended learning course. Whilst the ‘theme’ of the assessment had been predetermined, the students were, through the engagement with the technologies listed above, given the opportunity to influence and negotiate areas of the assessment such as mode, objectives, structure, delivery, grading criteria and submission.
This presentation will aim to give participants an opportunity to:
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gain an insight into how technology can be used to empower both students and staff when embarking on co-creating an assessment
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take part in a small co-creation activity using technology
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consider the potential pitfalls and opportunities of using technology to co-create assessments
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investigate preliminary results of a study into student attitudes and perceptions of using technology to co-create assessments.
References
Boud, D., and N. Falchikov. 2006. “Aligning Assessment with Long-term Learning.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 31 (4): 399–413.
Cook-Sather, A. 2014. “Student–Faculty Partnership in Explorations of Pedagogical Practice: A Threshold Concept in Academic Development.” International Journal for Academic Development 19 (3): 186–198.
Deeley, S. and Bovill, C. 2015. “Staff student partnership in assessment: enhancing assessment literacy through democratic practices.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
Duffy, P. and Bruns, A. 2006. “The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities”. In. Proceedings Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, pages pp. 31-38, Brisbane. 42(3): 463-477.
Ryan, A. and D. Tilbury. 2013. Flexible Pedagogies: New Pedagogical Ideas. York: Higher Education Academy. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/npi_report. pdf
