Assessment 2.0 Resources: What Does the Higher Education Sector Need?

We have been speaking to the lecturers who took part in our pilot projects to find out what resources they think would be useful to support academics who are using Web 2.0 technologies in assessment tasks. We have had a variety of suggestions, including:

• The resources should be short, easy to read, and accessible.
• Vignettes, case studies, and examples showing how other lecturers have used Web 2.0 technologies in assessment would be useful.
• It would be helpful to have a glossary of policy terminology.
• Include a description of the types of Web 2.0 tools available and how they might be used in learning and assessment activities.
• Create a space and support for an online community of academics who have used - or are going to use - Web 2.0 tools in their teaching. This would be a space for lecturers to discuss the issues about assessment and Web 2.0 and support each other when designing and implementing Web 2.0 assignments.
• Include some interactive tools - e.g., creating a rubric, designing assessment criteria.

We are now in the process of sifting through the large volumes of data we have collected from our 17 case studies and staff and student focus groups. These findings will inform and enrich the resources we develop. One of the main deliverables from our project will be a handbook with a framework of good practice principles, case studies, examples, and materials to support staff development and student learning.

One of the challenges we are facing at the moment is how to create a resource that is accessible and easy to read but also does justice to the rich and varied examples of practice we have examined in our case studies. We are aiming, therefore, to create a large resource that can be divided into smaller stand-alone sections.

Does anybody have any other suggestions about what resources would be useful for supporting Australian academics who are using Web 2.0 technologies in their teaching and assessment tasks?

Web 2.0 and learning management systems

Recently I met with staff from our university's IT Services who are undertaking a review of the university's enterprise systems, including the learning management system. We talked about the value of incorporating Web 2.0 tools within the LMS.

This got me thinking about what the lecturers we've spoken to during this project have had to say about Web 2.0 tools within learning management systems. Those who have used LMS wikis, blogs, etc., have talked about the poor usability of the tools - the word "clunky" comes up time and again. What is perhaps more interesting is that there are some who feel strongly that students would resist using social software that is packaged within an LMS. They believe that branding social technologies with a university logo would make them unappealing to students. There have also been suggestions that it would be inappropriate to contain social software within the virtual walls of the university: that it goes against the ideals of Web 2.0 and open publishing. On the other hand there are clearly administrative advantages to using LMS tools.

The connection between Web 2.0 software and LMS services is clearly of interest to the higher education community at the moment. An online seminar dedicated to the topic will be held in the US in late March. It will be interesting to see how Web 2.0 and LMS tools continue to converge in the near future and what impact this might have on the way Web 2.0 activities are incorporated into university education. Will it make it easier for lecturers to use Web 2.0 tools? Or will the question remain: do Web 2.0 tools really belong in learning management systems?

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.

Assessment of Student Web 2.0 Activities

Our research project aims to develop a set of guidelines formalising academic practices, standards and reporting relating to the use of "web 2.0" or social technologies for assessing student learning in higher education.

Web 2.0 forms of authoring or content creation activities include blogging/microblogging, photo and video sharing, podcasting, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual worlds and wiki writing. These activities can be undertaken using well-known tools such as WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, Delicious, MediaWiki, and so on.

Students are increasingly being asked to engage in these social web activities as part of their formal education. However, little has been reported about the challenges involved in assessing these activities and the implications there may be for academic integrity and assessment standards and reporting. While there are various guidelines available pointing to good assessment practices in general, web 2.0 activities are sufficiently different from anything that has preceded them that such guides may not cover all of the issues raised by the assessment of student web 2.0 activities (abbreviated in this blog as ASW2A). Our project aims to address this gap by developing a set of guidelines based on academics' experiences in using Web 2.0 tools in a range of teaching and learning settings in the Australian higher education system.

Some existing resources about Web 2.0 and assessment include:

Bobby Elliott's (2008) report "Assessment 2.0: Modernising assessment in the age of Web 2.0"

Franklin and van Harmelen's (2007) JISC report on Web 2.0 in higher education

Boud and associate's (2010) report "Assessment 2020"