Project I: "Assess Now": An iPad App for assessing student presentations
Professor David Shallcross of the Engineering Learning Unit has developed an iPad App which allows tailored, individual feedback to be provided to students. David developed the system after being faced with the challenge of providing meaningful feedback to students as they presented 5-minute talks on engineering topics. Assessing up to 30 students a day, David initially used a paper-based method to score and provide feedback, but the process of translating the notes into useful text took much longer.
Having assessed student presentations for many years David began to prepare a list of some of the more common comments that students receive, including their depth of knowledge of the topic, their presentation skills, their slide design, their confidence and their teamwork in putting together a team presentation.
The iPad App that has now been developed allows the presentation to be scored in real time. Comments can be selected from a menu of over 160 items. The App also allows individual comments to be created and saved for later use. The assessor can even add a sound file allowing more personalized comments to be provided to the student. After review of the file, its now possible for students to receive their personalized and tailored feedback on their oral presentation within an hour of leaving their class. Response by the students has been supportive. To date the App has been successfully used in subjects across the University to deliver timely feedback to over 2000 students.
Originally developed to deliver feedback on student oral presentations the app can be adapted to deliver feedback on a range of assessment tasks, such as clinical exams or performance pieces, when the assessment needs to be completed rapidly in real time.
The technology used to support this project is only available for the iPad.
For further information about how Assess Now works please see the PDF manual available here
Project II : Engaged learning through online quizzes
This project was developed by Dr Brian Cook from School of Geography in the Faculty of Science. Brian employed a system across a semester that involved using the LMS to deliver short, online multiple choice quizzes to students on a weekly basis. The quizzes were based on core material that the students needed to cover before starting the weeks' work (lectures, seminars, etc.). From a pool of questions, students were given a randomised subset of questions each week on specific, core "pre-reading" material. Students could take the quiz three times prior to the deadline, which was the night before a specific class. Students were given their score after each of their attempts, and a student's mark was based on the best scores of the quizzes they completed. In order to encourage participation and engagement with the pre-reading, a proportion of students' marks on the quizzes across the semester contributed to their final grade in the subject.
An important part of the system that Brian set up was that it enabled him to review students' collective quiz responses based on LMS data prior to his lectures. This meant he could spend a short amount of time in some lectures, reviewing concepts that students had difficulty with, based on their responses to the quizzes.
Brian found that the vast majority of students engaged with the quizzes and he received very positive feedback in an evaluation of the subject. Students reported that the quizzes motivated them, kept them on track, and facilitated better discussion in face-to-face classes as most students had covered the core material. His SES scores were impressive
The technologies used to support this project are all available in the LMS. The quizzes feed directly into the Grade Centre, meaning that there is no marking, and there is very little work once the quiz has been built and integrated into the LMS. Academics interested in this project should be prepared to assign core texts on a regular basis for students and be able to develop a bank of multiple-choice questions (around 40 items). Academics should also be prepared to allocate a small amount of lecture time at regular intervals to provide collective feedback to students about their quiz responses.