CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript ofMoving Assessment Online with Richard Lee
“My name is Richard Lee. I'm a Senior Lecturer in the Law School and I teach mainly on the undergraduate program which is called the LLB. This year on one of the units on the LLB, which is the Criminal Law unit, which I am the leader for, we have decided to try a new form of assessment for the in-course assessment. Traditionally in law you would often see a piece of written coursework, normally about 3000 words, which would be worth about half of the assessment - the other part being an exam at the end of the year. But we want to try and diversify our form of assessment within the Law School, and so what we are trying in Criminal Law is a form of oral assessment. And the idea behind it is that the student will be given some form of issue to discuss or it could even be that they are asked to advise a potential client on a legal matter. Now, it is a purely oral recording.There is no video component and equally they are not meant to be doing it in front of any member of staff acting as a judge or other form of interviewer. The student will go away and do it purely by themselves in their own time. So in some respects it could be likened to a form of written coursework that is simply being read out, a form of oral coursework. It is unusual because we are not going to give the student any help in terms of the technology. The students have been told very clearly that they need to find their own mechanism of how they are going to record this particular presentation. They are have been advised use a smartphone, use a laptop with the webcam turned off, and there are obviously facilities that the university can also provide. Hopefully we are going to see students engage in the process and getting to grips with having to deal with their own IT problems and not relying on us; so there is an idea of self-sufficiency there.
In terms of the submission mechanism, we are keeping it purely online. The students have been given a link on Moodle, which they can use to upload their oral presentation. The markers will then access those students who they have been allocated to mark and just listen to the recording either on their own laptops of MP3 players or whatever it is, and then carry out the marking process. In terms of the marking process, the students have been also asked to upload two other things alongside their oral presentation.And that is a bibliography - just so we can see what sources they are using - and they have also been asked to upload a simply page of A4 which sets out in bullet point format the structure of their presentation. Those two documents are just designed to help the markers, but do not form part of the formal assessment itself.
Once the students have uploaded this all onto Moodle and the markers have had a look at it, the idea is to also give feedback purely via Moodle as well. What the marker will do is go into a little box that will be returned back to the students and in the box we will adopt what has become now the Law School-wide policy of writing three good things about their work, and then they will also mention three areas that can be improved upon.
We have five assessment criteria, five learning outcomes I suppose I should say, sorry. And the debate is designed to affix to the two or three of those. Mainly it is the ability to research things, to be able to orally present information and also to carry out the recording itself, the IT skills part of it. Those are the learning outcomes we are trying to hit with this particular assessment.
The desire to move everything onto Moodle, to go completely online, comes out of some work we were doing last year when we had an assessment online as well. It has a number of advantages. First of all, by moving everything online, the submission online, what that means is that the student can submit anytime they want to, from anywhere they want to. It is also useful for the markers, and also the moderators and also the external examiner because the markers will be able to access every student’s work. Again for moderation, no need to swap any work, I simply, as the unit leader, allocate out what needs to be moderated to the marking team and they can again access the students work directly online and look at that and moderate it. The external examiner was also quite complimentary about this system because he is given access to Moodle, and he can also see all of the work, he can see what has been moderated, he can see all our comments, and he can get an idea of the standard of marking, and can satisfy himself that it has been suitably robust and applied properly.So there are many good reasons why it is good to submit online and store the data online. In terms of the return to students, the reverse operation is also very useful to them because the feedback posted online and at a certain date we open up the gradebook facility on Moodle and all the students can see their feedback.
Moving onto Moodle is a great idea, highly recommend it, but you do need to have sufficient resources in place to manage that procedure. I would say that if you do decide to go down this route, speak first to your faculty officer, who is your Moodle expert, get their advice, get their opinion and get their comments on how to make it work and then after that has been done it is normally a very simple matter to set up a Moodle page, and the assessment, and the access. So very good system, highly recommend it, but do make sure that you speak with a Moodle expert to make sure you know what you are doing first.”