Web 2.0 as a new assessment option: What are the possibilities and what are the challenges?

Rosemary Clerehan and Judy SheardMonash University

Higher Education IT Summit25-26 October 2010

Outline of presentation

1. Web 2.0 in higher education

2. Affordances of Web 2.0 – what are the possibilities?

3. Our research project – Web 2.0: new directions for assessment and academic integrity

4. Where, how, why is Web 2.0 used in higher education?

5. Using Web 2.0 in assessment – what are the challenges?

2

Why and how might we want our students to use the social web to demonstrate their learning?

Affordances of Web 2.0 for learning, teaching & assessment?

O’Reilly & Battelle

(2009, p. 2)

O’Reilly, T., & Battelle, J. (2009). Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. Special Report for the Web 2.0 Summit, 20-22 October , San Francisco CA. http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/28/web2009_websquared-whitepaper.pdf

“One of the fundamental ideas underlying Web 2.0 [is] that successful network applications are systems for harnessing collective intelligence ... a large group of people can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that provided by any of the individual participants”

Affordances of Web 2.0:What are the possibilities?

• Open publishing

• Communication styles and texts

• Personal identity and experience

• Co-creation, collaboration, crowdsourcing

• Content management

Open publishing

• Student work can be made easily accessible to an audience of peers for mutual benefit including reviewing and rating.

• Review and assessment of student work from outside the university can be invited or anticipated.

Communication styles and texts

• Web 2.0 assignments can involve frequent short pieces of work employing conversational language and combining audio, video, images & text.

• Feedback can be exchanged rapidly, using rating or ranking systems, informal rejoinders, audio, video, images, icons.

Personal identity and experience

• Students’ online identity can be different from the student who is recognisable in class.

• Students’ social or cultural experiences of web authoring can influence the work they produce for assessment.

• Reflection and self-reflection about the idea of identity are prompted by the need to create and express an online identity.

Co-creation, collaboration, crowdsourcing

• Group work can scale between a small closed group and a large free-to-join learning community

• Individual contributions to group work can (sometimes) be distinguished.

• Groups can work on large, complex tasks.

Content management

• Students’ assessable work may consist of remixing web content from diverse sources.

• Students’ assessable work may be posted on several host sites. Work posted on one site may be syndicated by others and tracked back.

• Students can control the content they produce for assessment in accordance with terms of service, end user agreements or other governance policies of host sites.

Where, how, why is Web 2.0 used in higher education? An ALTC project

investigation

Web 2.0 authoring tools in higher education learning and teaching: new directions for assessment and academic integrity.

Project aims

• Investigation of Web 2.0 experiences of academics – with focus on assessment and academic integrity.

• Development of good practice guidelines for use of web 2.0 in higher education.

Project team

Jenny Waycott (project manager), Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne.

Celia Thompson, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne.

Margaret Hamilton, School of Computer Science and IT, RMIT University.

Joan Richardson, School of Business Information Technology, RMIT University.

Kathleen Gray (project leader), Faculty of Medicine / Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne.

Rosemary Clerehan, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University.

Judithe Sheard, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University.

Project stages

• Survey of academics using Web 2.0 in their teaching – an overview of the use of Web 2.0.

• Interviews of academics using Web 2.0 - exploring issues around assessment and academic integrity.

• Pilot projects – field testing ideas for good practice guidelines.

• Development and dissemination of good practice guidelines and resources.

Project stages

• Survey of academics using Web 2.0 in their teaching – an overview of the use of Web 2.0.

• Interviews of academics using Web 2.0 - exploring issues around assessment and academic integrity.

• Pilot projects – field testing ideas for good practice guidelines.

• Development and dissemination of good practice guidelines and resources.

Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: Where

Survey responses from Australian academics using Web 2.0 for assessment of student learning that is summative (and not formative).

Field of Study Number of respondents

Humanities / Society & Culture 16

Education15

Information Technology 11

Medicine & Health9

Management & Commerce6

Other 3

Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: Where

Number of students

enrolled in subject

Number of responses

Less than 50 21

50-100 10

101-200 9

More than 200 7

69% undergraduate and 31% postgraduate subjects

Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: How

Type of Web 2.0 activity Number of responses

Wiki writing 32

Blogging/microblogging 31

Social networking 17

Audio/video podcasting 16

Virtual world activities 12

Social bookmarking 11

Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: How

How much the assignment is

worth

Number of responses

01-10% 7

11-20% 11

21-30% 9

31-40% 6

41-50% 9

51-60% 2

61-70% 0

71-80% 3

81-90% 2

91-100% 4

Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: Why

Intended learning outcomes Number of

responses

Generic or graduate skills or attributes 35

Specialised knowledge or skills required in a

discipline or profession29

Foundation knowledge or skills preparatory to

a discipline or profession28

And what about assessment?

• Assessment is very traditional

– marks, comments, using rubrics

• Not much evidence of creative or new assessment, e.g.

– peer assessment

– self assessment

– online assessment

– automatic assessment

Using Web 2.0 for assessment: What are the challenges?

• Students working in the new media

– Student autonomy vs. structure and guidance

– Developing voice and identity

– Collaborating with other students

• Appropriate assessment criteria for Web 2.0

– Assessing co-created content

• Implementation and management

• Increase in marking workload

What is an appropriate fit between what assessment is trying to achieve and what Web 2.0 can do?

Students working in the new media

Student autonomy vs. structure and guidance

“... the bottom third of the class had difficulty thinking about what to post on when it was left completely up to them. .... it’s that eternal teaching struggle, how much guidance you give, if you give too much guidance are you constraining the best students, if you don’t give enough guidance you’re leaving the weaker students to flounder. So it’s trying to find some midpoint there.”

Students working in the new media

Developing voice and identity

“There’s a process that goes into *students+ finding their different voices, how to share appropriately, how to write with authority. So it’s trying to find some midpoint there. “

Collaborating with other students

“... students found it challenging to co-create content and collaborate with other students.” - learning to become a co-author

Appropriate assessment criteria for Web 2.0 tasks

“The assessor is not assessing a written document, they’re assessing a page which ... is a whole labyrinth of choices and connections, so they’ve got to actually work their way through ... decision paths and decision tree and things like that.”

“*Students+ are producing very different things, so I suppose the criteria need to capture that in some way”

The different style of writing in a Web 2.0 assignment made marking more difficult “because the content does not have to be of an academic standard it can be hard (to) assess, e.g. marking sloppy/lazy prose.”

•

Assessing co-created content

“How do you mark assignments when students can change/overwrite each other’s work! Many students who contributed early, found that their work was completely lost. How do you manage this process of overwriting and still contributing to the same content?”

Implementation and management

“ *There is a lot of+ work involved in setting up *the blog assignment] and making sure all the students know how to do it. If you ask them to write an essay they just go off and write it, you don’t have to spend the first three weeks of the course teaching them about essays.”

“since a lot of the students had no experience with this as an assessment task they needed ... feedback on what’s working, what’s not working, how they can improve, how they can build.”

Increase in marking workload

“Last year I had them doing a blog every week … the marking was killing me because you’ve got to mark them and get them back in a week. And then you’ve got four or five classes, that’s six or seven hours work a week in marking. And then you’ve got assignments and exams.”

... and then there is Web 3.0

October 2009 29

References

Gray, K., Thompson, C., Clerehan, R., Sheard, J., & Hamilton, M. (2008). Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity. The Internet and Higher Education, 11(2), 112-118.

Gray, K., Thompson, C., Sheard, J., Clerehan, R., & Hamilton, M. (2010). Students as web 2.0 authors: Implications for assessment design and conduct. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(1), 105-122.

Webinar: www.transformingassessment.com/events_26_may_2010.php

Workshops 2010-11 @ HERDSA, ATN Assessment, ASCILITE, ACE

AcknowledgementsProject Advisory Group• Matthew Allen, Bill Anderson, Greg Battye, Robyn Benson, Tracey Bretag, Jenny Buckworth,

Denise Chalmers, Geoffrey Crisp, Leitha Delves, Bobby Elliott, Jacqui Ewart, Glenn Finger, Tom Franklin, Merrilyn Goos, Scott Grant, Ashley Holmes, Christopher Hughes, David Jones, Marj Kibby, Adrian Kirkwood, Mark Lee, Catherine McLoughlin, Beverley Oliver, Kaz Ross, Alison Ruth, Royce Sadler, Mary Simpson, Arthur Winzenried, Katina Zammit, Lynette Zeeng.

Project Reference Group• Michael Abulencia, Robyn Benson, John Benwell, Marsha Berry, Marilys Guillemin, Laura

Harris, Deborah Jones, Gregor Kennedy, Shaun Khoo, George Kotsanas, Lauren O’Dwyer, Jason Patten, Emma Read, Julianne Reid, Gordon Sanson, Cristina Varsavsky.

Project Pilot-testing Group• Matthew Absolom, Anne Davies, Cathy Farrell, Scott Grant, Terry Hallahan, Michael

Henderson, John Hurst, Ramon Lobato, Warren McKeown, Michael Nott, Kerry Pantzopoulos, Michele Ruyters, Michael Smith, Sandra Smith, Robyn Spence-Brown, Elizabeth Stewart, John Terrell, Jenny Weight, Lynette Zeeng

ALTC Support for this project has been provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd. (www.altc.edu.au), an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed in this presentation do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, or the views of individual contributors apart from the project team.