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
- 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
2 comments:
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?
I love technology and the possibilities it offers to a constructivist environment. I actually think that technology is the biggest thing to happen to education since the accessibility of pen and paper.
No arguing that information is rapid so we need to develop learning that is equally as rapid - authentic learning tasks are a way to achieve this. Because the task in contextualised a range of other incidental learnings also occur to build a holistic knowledge and understanding - more than could be achieved in static assessment tasks.
Thanks Maxine - made me rethink assessment items - they are often neglected in online environment. Time to dust it off and have another look :)
The changing role of the teacher.
In the online course, I naturally see the teacher as disempowered which helps with this shift in thinking. In a traditional classroom the teacher walks in and there's us and him/her. Students are younger, teacher is older (usually). Students are seated, teacher is standing at the front with that big board/computer to control. Anybody put in that physical space naturally goes into "blah, blah, blah" mode without thinking about it!
Online, the teacher logs in the same as the student. The teacher comments on discussions, the same as students. The teacher is not represented as bigger, up the front or more important in any way. So teachers naturally will sit back a little more and see what happens.
I'm constantly experimenting with bringing this "sit back" approach into my classroom. It gets some strong reactions sometimes as I'm working against the physical space (the teacher should be up the front!). Therefore, I think we should redesign classrooms! Somehow make them more like an online environment :) For language, groups or a horseshoe works best. But I'm for a classroom with minimal furniture, or collapsible in some way!
The changing role of the students.
This one is the bane of my teaching world. If you think it's hard to get Australians to be active in class, I challenge you to a year in China! These students are so used to being lectured at and told what to do for their whole 21 years of existence that asking them to be active in class is my biggest challenge. They simply aren't used to it.
I read a paper that suggested that Chinese students don't appreciate questioning material before they've fully learnt it, understood it, and practised it several times over. This has intrigued me and I wonder if I could ease my teachings into a mix between Confucian learning and scaffolding a more active classroom. Big ask!
But I forgot about online. This is also a challenge online - to have an active class. As students are now feeling more free to lurk and not contribute. As we investigated in our interaction paper, interactive activities need to be designed, the facilitator needs to encourage interactivity and the environment should attract learners with diagrams, pictures, video, interactive sites and voice as much as possible.
Cheers.
Post a Comment