Pilot Projects

We are currently embarking on the pilot phase of our project, which involves field-testing our draft good practice guidelines on the assessment of student Web 2.0 activities.

There will be 18 pilot projects in total, drawn from different learning and teaching settings in five Australian universities (The University of Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, Swinburne, and Victoria University). The university teaching staff who have agreed to take part in our pilots have expressed great enthusiasm for the project, and we have been impressed with the range of innovative learning activities that our participants have implemented in their courses. The 18 pilot projects come from a wide range of subject areas, and include a variety of Web 2.0 tools and different learning activities. These include: wiki writing in accounting, social networking in languages, vodcasting in business, role-playing blogs in legal studies, reflective blogs in cultural studies, virtual worlds in business studies, virtual worlds in language studies, along with many others.

Each pilot project will focus on a particular assignment in which students are assessed for their Web 2.0 activities. We will be examining the processes lecturers and other teaching staff follow when designing, implementing, marking and reviewing the assignment. The main aim of this stage of the research is to assess the usefulness of our draft guidelines, to determine how the guidelines could be improved, and to provide detailed examples of case studies of the assessment of student Web 2.0 activities in higher education. These examples will be incorporated into the final good practice guidelines document, which will be disseminated to Australian universities at the end of this year.

Publications

An academic paper based on research that preceded this project will be published in a coming issue of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. The paper, written by project team members, has been accepted for publication and will be available soon.

Kathleen Gray has written a guest column for the monthly newsletter “Melbourne University Student/Staff E-news” (MUSSE). In this column, Kathleen cautions that while there are many arguments that support the use of Web 2.0 tools or social software in higher education, a “cool and clear” approach is needed to ensure that social web-based learning activities are implemented and assessed appropriately. Guidelines based on evidence and examples of good practice are needed to make this possible. Kathleen argues that while there are individual examples of “innovative and exemplary work” in which academics and students have used Web 2.0 tools in HE, we are yet to see “collective efforts in Australia or internationally to develop and share appropriate practices.” Our project aims to address this gap.