As a final workshop session, where I wanted to engage with the JISC team (I will be a ‘superdelegate’ at the JISC online conference later this year), I went to ‘From Challenge to Change’. I’d already been to the full day workshops in the past, but it’s good to re-engage with the exercises and think how these could be effectively into use in my own institutional context(s). After 3 intense days of thinking/listening/engaging, it was also good to allow the brain to work at a different level.
Challenge Statements
An exercise to consider how far agree/disagree with teaching and learning statements related to assessment, the full kit is here.
Getting the Clickers Going
I have a love/hate relationship with Clickers… I love the idea of what they can do, I find it difficult to make ours work, therefore not inspiring confidence in others to use them. These were all set up, were tiny, and worked v. easily – worth a look maybe! From recollection, those institutions that have made good use of Clickers have issued one to each student, and therefore they can be used throughout all classes.
A look at ‘Effective Assessment in a Digital Age’
A PDF of the report.
Discussion Results
A number of questions got the discussion going – here we see that out of the 23 people in the room, the largest number found the most difficulty in providing timely (and quality) feedback to students, although the project was demonstrating that too much emphasis had been placed on this by institutions, and that more focus needs to be on how students ENGAGE with feedback.
Case Study Discussion
We had a final chat through a case study, and focused upon audio feedback. We discussed a few potential (tech) solutions, such as Voicethread.com, and Brian Whalley suggested that they’ve been trialling audio feedback combined with vice recognition software, gives a print-out (as the students don’t appear to accept audio-only as official feedback). Winchester has also been trialing screencasting audio feedback. In all these there’s at least a transition period in which the audio feedback takes longer than the written feedback, so long-term worthwhile-ness and speed games are up for consideration, as well as whether the students actually appreciate it.
All resources in the design studio http://bit.ly/jiscassess, and we’re encouraged to use these in staff development exercises.
