Assessment benchmarking: accumulating and accelerating institutional know - how for best practice

Benchmarking offers a comprehensive way of measuring current practice in an institution; whilst also gauging achievement against external sources. Although e-learning has been benchmarked with a number of universities in the UK and abroad no one to date has tackled the area of assessment; which is now becoming of more concern with the advent of e-assessment. This paper describes the construction of a set of benchmarking measures/indicators and the outcome of early pilots which combine data from a survey instrument of these measures with semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that the benchmark measures this project has identified can form a solid foundation for benchmarking and that a mixed methods approach built around thisa comprehensive and robust core of benchmark measures can have value to institutions; not just in external benchmarking but also in internal reviews. It can also assist with setting baselines, exploring the student experience, providing staff with data meaningful to their role and professional development together with supporting a continuous improvement trajectory

Is there a net generation coming to university?

This paper reports the first phase of an ESRC funded research project to investigate first year students' use of technology in relation to the idea of young people born after 1983 forming a distinct age cohort described variously as the Net generation or Digital Natives. The research took place in five English universities in the spring of 2008. The research found a far more complex picture than that suggested by the rhetoric with student use of new technologies varying between different universities and courses. Some of the more discussed new technologies such as blogs, wikis and virtual worlds were shown to be less used by students than might have been expected. The Net generation appears if anything to be a collection of minorities with a small number of technophobic students and larger numbers of others making use of new technologies but in ways that did not fully correspond with many of the expectations built into the Net generation and Digital Natives theses

Reflections on developing a tool for creating visual representations of learning designs: towards a visual language for learning designs

Over the past four years we have been developing CompendiumLD, a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It has been developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out a design or learning sequence. CompendiumLD is a specialised version of Compendium, a tool for managing connections between information and ideas, which has been applied in many domains including the mapping of discussions and arguments. As most of the core knowledge mapping facilities provided by Compendium are included within CompendiumLD, it can be used for learning design, and applied it to other information mapping and modelling problems. Evidence gathered since CompendiumLD’s first release has shown the many conditions in which it is likely to be applied and appreciated by users, and that the need for visualising learning designs as a solution to understanding how all components of planned learning and teaching fit together may continue to grow. Furthermore, the use of technology is making the process of creating courses more complex. We explore these challenges and conclude with some reflections on the developments in visual representation needed to further facilitate the modelling of today and tomorrow’s complex learning situations

Authentic assessment: What does it mean and how is it instantiated by a group of distance learning academics?

This paper reports on a project undertaken at The Open University which set out to explore academics’ notion and practice of authentic assessment. The findings revealed that authentic assessment is not only a difficult notion to define but it is also problematic to collate features within an assessment task that define it as authentic assessment. An electronic questionnaire was constructed to investigate academics’ understanding of authentic assessment. The tutors’ perceptions of authentic assessment fell into two distinct areas: one that is associated with real world scenarios and the other linked to the construction and marking of an authentic assessment task. The findings point the way towards increasing the understanding of this concept in order to avoid making assessment appear on the surface to be more like real life but with the students still perceiving the questions to be rather artificial and contrived

Benchmarking assessment: breaking down barriers and building institutional understanding

Benchmarking offers a comprehensive way of measuring current practice in an institution; whilst also gauging achievement against external sources. Although e-learning has been benchmarked with a number of universities in the UK and abroad no one to date has tackled the area of assessment; which is now becoming of more concern with the advent of e-assessment. This paper describes the construction of a set of benchmarking measures/indicators and the outcome of early pilots which combine a survey instrument and semi-structured interview methodologies. The findings suggest that building a comprehensive and robust core of benchmark measures can have great utility and value to institutions; not just in external benchmarking but also in internal reviews. It can also assist with setting baselines, exploring the student experience, providing staff with data meaningful to their role and professional development together with supporting a continuous improvement trajectory

MOOC adaptation and translation to improve equity in participation

There is an urgent need to improve elementary and secondary school classroom practices across India and the scale of this challenge is argued to demand new approaches to teacher professional learning.  Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represent one such approach and which, in the context of this study, is considered to provide a means by which to transcend traditional training processes and disrupt conventional pedagogic practices. This paper offers a critical review of a large-scale MOOC deployed in English, and then in Hindi, to support targeted sustainable capacity building within an education development initiative (TESS-India) across seven states in India.  The study draws on multiple sources of participant data to identify and examine features which stimulated a buzz around the MOOCs, leading to over 40,000 registrations and a completion rate of approximately 50% for each of the two MOOCs

E-Pedagogy of Handheld Devices 2013 Survey: Patterns of student use for learning

The Pedagogy of Ebooks (E-Ped) project began in 2012 and seeks to document, analyse and explain the changing study practices of UK distance learning students as they employ, adapt and integrate the use of new portable digital devices such as e-book readers and tablets into their learning. This report describes the results of an undergraduate survey undertaken in 2013 at the Open University (UK) which asked students how they used e-readers, tablets and smartphones for study. This research represents a snapshot of the rapidly changing interaction between technology and education, and highlights issues and opportunities for Higher Education in supporting student adoption of appropriate technologies and development of effective new methods of study

The use, role and reception of open badges as a method for formative and summative reward in two Massive Open Online Courses

Open online learning courses such as cMOOCs and xMOOCs differ from conventional courses yet it remains uncertain how, and if, existing common yet costly practices associated with teacher-driven formative and summative assessment strategies can be made to work in this new context. For courses that carry no charge for registration or participation, authors of open online courses have to consider alternative approaches to engaging, motivating and sustaining study and for helping participants manage, plan and demonstrate their own learning. One such approach is that of open badges or similar such visual public symbols that communicate to others a particular quality, achievement or affiliation possessed by the owner. This paper reports the role, reception and use of open badges in two ‘massive’ open online courses delivered in 2013 with attention to varied functions of badges and the a distinction between formative and summative applications. The paper will then draw upon data from end of course surveys, which specifically asked about badges, pre-course surveys, and user comments made during the course on platforms such as Twitter to examine what value participants ascribed to the open badges. Although there was found to be a broadly positive response to badges in both MOOCs, the reasons for this were often very different, and approximately a quarter of respondents remained sceptical or concerned about their role. The paper concludes by reflecting on the open badge as a formative instrument for providing the learner with an indication of progress and achievement