There is little argument that reflective writing is a good way to foster critical thinking, encourage self expression, and give students a sense of ownership of their work (Chretien et al. 2012, Kennison and Misselwitz, 2002).
Almost every academic discipline includes content on which learner reflection is appropriate; so the problem, typically, is not in creating the assignment but rather in assessing the work. How do we place a fair and equitable grade on an assignment that has so many variables? What are we looking for in our students’ work that we can reward and encourage with a good grade?
AS many as 125 students at Harvard University are being probed for allegedly cheating in a final exam at the elite institution, administrators said last Thursday.
In early 2010 Todd Bacile started hearing from companies about a new measure they were using to help decide whom to hire: the Klout score, a number that calculates a person’s online influence based on his or her presence across various social-media networks.
So when Mr. Bacile began teaching an electronic-marketing class at Florida State University last year, he created a Klout-based project worth 10 percent of the final grade. Klout.com calculates “influence” based on a user’s level of engagement on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook. It then assigns a score on a scale of 1 to 100, with the average score being 40.
Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value. Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours.
Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).
Society does not in general reward contributions to the public good. Indeed, quite the opposite - in order to earn profit, corporations and individuals bribe governments to act against the public interest. Companies are more interested in seeing services privatized, instituting user fees, or other measures designed to wring wealth out of what might otherwise be a universal program. As for long range public good, such as environmental protection, or society-wide public good, such as energy and information access, more money is to be made ignoring the public good than supporting it.
Tegrity’s Remote Proctoring feature ensures the integrity of exams taken off campus, without the need to send the student to an expensive, and often distant proctoring facility. Rather, using a webcam and microphone the student can take their exam at their home while Tegrity records video of the student taking the test, along with the associated screen activity. The recordings cannot be paused while the student takes the exam, and when completed, the recording is immediately uploaded for instructors to review at up to 8x speed.
Students taking free online courses offered by the startup company Coursera have reported dozens of incidents of plagiarism, even though the courses bear no academic credit. This week a professor leading one of the so-called Massive Open Online Courses posted a plea to his 39,000 students to stop plagiarizing, and Coursera's leaders say they will review the issue and consider adding plagiarism-detection software in the future.
Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. Each keystroke, comprehension quiz, peer-to-peer forum discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed and, most importantly, absorbed.
KF: From around the 10 minute mark in the video Daphne discusses assessment and feedback strategies. There is also some interesting discussion around the efficacy and validity of Self and Peer assessment strategies - an area that many educational sectors could review more seriously. (see Sadler and Good 2006 - http://tinyurl.com/EdAssess )
What are the issues relating to cheating in online courses? Cheating goes high tech: “This is the gamification of education, and students are winning,” the professor told me. The Shadow...
The first step in writing a rubric is to investigate if the process, product or performance that students will be engaged in deserves a rubric. Once you've established that a rubric is a good fit, there are several different starting options.
Film recordings of keynote addresses by Anthony McClaran, Rt Hon David Willetts MP and Shabana Mahmood MP, and the Question Time panel, will be published on the QAA website w/c 9 July. Notes from each of the day's seminars will be published shortly.
Once a test is designed, teachers do not have a voice in the content. [...] it assumes that the content being tested is aligned with local or state standards as well as beliefs as to what is important to know.
In order to better understand what leads students to cheat, colleges and universities need to break the code of silence and apply their own academic methods to the problem...
Open Badges are (adapted from Doug’s presentation above):
* visual representations of achievements, learning, skills, interests, competencies – anything you want the badge to represent, * a complement to traditional education ‘certification’, * capable of accommodating formal or informal pathway for learning, * representative of hard & soft skills, peer assessment, and ‘stakable lifelong learning’, * snapshots of learning wherever or however it occurred, * ‘stealth assessment’!
Academia has lots and lots and lots of systems in place for assuring that credit is always given where credit is due. If you're writing a paper, there are particular ways to cite internet sources-- even tweets and Facebook posts.
But what about on the internet? We know we're supposed to cite sources, but a standardized system hasn't developed, and in the meantime, you could face a lawsuit if you steal someone else's work, even by accident.
In my experience, people usually don't consciously decide to plagiarize, but they may end up plagiarizing "by accident" because they run out of time, or they get confused about the assignment, or maybe they copy-and-paste, intending to go back and edit later but forgetting to do so. Every time that I have seen plagiarism in an assignment, the person swore that the plagiarism happened "by accident." That does not change the fact of the matter: plagiarism, even when it happens by accident, is still plagiarism, and the consequences are serious. It's like when you are caught speeding or running a red light: it doesn't matter if you did not know you were speeding or if you did not notice the red light - you are still going to get a ticket.
The book also offers an unsettling account of higher education at perhaps its most cynical and mercantile. Some of his clients are rich and entitled, and see outsourcing their papers as a logical extension of the transactional nature of their relationship with their college. Others are simply unprepared for college because they lack the ability or the language skills to communicate adequately in English.
After a tremendous response to our Call for presentations, workshops and posters, we are delighted to announce the programme for eAssessment Scotland 2012. With over 60 presentations from across the globe, this year's conference is set to be the largest yet. And for the first time, we will be launching an online programme, allowing even more of you to join in the unique experience that is eAssessment Scotland - the UK's largest conference dedicated to exploring the best examples of eAssessment in the world today. read more
If you are interested but can’t make the day event thent there’s a series of 22 free online events between the 23rd of August and 6th of September.
Courtenay Harris, Helen Flavell and I are presenting on our experiences with eMarking and the OLT funded project that emerged from the ashes of our early attempts to implement eMarking in a very large (>2000 students) unit in the common core first year curriculum in Health Sciences here at Curtin.
What are the ‘top 5′ features or functions of Turnitin? Do you agree with this list produced by the Learning Technologies blog? I have added my own little extra after a choice quote from the post, to highlight why I agree (or disagree) with it:
While technology brought disruptive change in many industries, education is only now hovering at the brink of deep and fundamental changes. Open Education and online education challenge the traditional bricks and mortar institution and several forces are driving disaggregation and democratization of the entire educational value chain. A learner now can take a course taught by Yale professors from the comfort of his living room in a remote part of the world. While much has changed, one significant problem of education, assessment needs to be reinvented.
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