Changing roles in online pedagogy

Tackling the well-healed assumptions about the nature of assessment held by teachers, students and universities can inhibit engagement with the conception of high quality, sustainable assessment that provides a rich learning experience for students in an online learning environment

Role of assessment

• assessment practices should prepare students to be effective learners in a learning society and equip students with a ‘learning approach for life’.
• the role of assessment is to enable students to make judgements about their learning by engaging in their own self-assessment rather than considering each learning task as a discrete event in their learning journey (Boud, 2000).
• authentic assessment tasks and learning dilemmas should instilled a learning climate that promotes independent, self-directed learners

Role of the teacher

• Students learn from their own activity, not those of the teacher
• Teachers must be willing to move away from past practice of the traditional, didactic, delivery-focused model of teaching and redesign assessment from a holistic, student-focused, constructivist viewpoint of transformative learning
• online pedagogy then becomes a learning enterprise which builds on the student’s belief about their own performance capacity (Boud, 2000)
• The course facilitator imust ntentionally built, managed and nurtured (Reushle, 2006) the learning environment to develop an inclusive, safe, supportive learning community where students could interact, collaborate, critique and share their learning experiences.

Role of the Student

• student is responsible for the learning and the central point between assessment and learning
• The role of the student is seen as active, engaged, and critical assessors in the learning process where students make sense of the information, relate it to prior knowledge and master the skills involved (Earl, 2003).

What are your views on the changing roles of assessment, teachers and learners? How important are these roles tothe success of rich learning experiences in online pedagogy?

References

Boud, D. (2000). Sustainable assessment: rethinking assessment for the learning society. Studies in Continuing Education, 22(2), 151-167

Earl, L. (2003). Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximise Student Learning. California: Corwin Press.

Reushle, S. (2006). A Framework for Designing Higher Education e-Learning Environments. Retrieved January 9, 2008, from http://eprints.usq.edu.au/archive/00001226/01/reushle06.pdf