Digital age assessment

In this continuation of my short series on new and emerging pedagogy, I can reflect on my last two posts which focused on the potential for any time any place learning and the changing roles of teachers and students, The latter is characterised by students who take more responsibility to not only discover their own learning and determine their own pathways, but also using their personal devices to learn through knowledge creation, sharing, repurposing and organisation. These posts were prompted by a blog written by Daniel Christian on emerging trends of new pedagogy.

Christian's third trend is perhaps the most technology focused. He says: "An increased use of technology not only to deliver teaching, but also to support and assist students and to provide new forms of student assessment." This is an important point. Assessment and learning are inseparable in any good pedagogy. If the first does not fit the second, then we see a failure of that pedagogy. Far too often assessment fails to delve deeply enough, or fails to capture actual learning. If students are relying increasingly on digital technology to connect them with content, peers and tutors, and to facilitate new, distributed forms of learning, then we should endeavour to assess the learning they achieve in a relevant manner.

For my own students, especially those who are increasingly familiar with technology, I have introduced new formats and modes of assessment. No longer do they need to stick to paper based essays. They can also submit videos, blogs or wikis if they so choose. The assessment criteria themselves do not change, but the marking rubrics do. In a recent post on assessing students entitled 'Digital Assignments: How shall we grade them?' I focused on some of the issues we can encounter when we shift modes and allow formats other than the traditional paper based essay. These included issues of equivalency of effort and word count, the sequencing of content and the differing affordances of technologies and platforms.

The times are changing, and so should our methods of pedagogy.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


A growing divide? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.