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Developing Assessment to support Student Learning

I've just watched Professor Graham Gibbs deliver a very powerful keynote speech at the Assessment, Learning and Teaching day of our annual staff development festival at Leeds Met. He presented empirical evidence that revealed the approaches to assessment that support student learning, and the approaches that don't.

The key points, as I interpreted them, were:

Lots of feedback is the route to quality learning. The majority of resources should be devoted to this.

The more summative assessment you have, the worse off everybody is.

The programme, award, course - whatever you want to call it - that thing that has a discipline specific title and lasts for 3 years - is the most effective container for learning. Splitting a course into 24 mini courses makes things worse.

Students need to be welcomed into their course's community of practice, which is populated by 3 full years of co-learners, plus staff.

The more explicit you are about criteria, the more students will work for a mark and miss the point of learning.

Students often see marks as a judgement about them as a person, rather than a judgement of their learning. There is great value in learning that doesn't result in a mark.

Feedback needs to be received as soon as possible to have any real value. Quick and dirty feedback is better than accurate but delayed feedback.

Peer support and peer pressure help quality learning to take place.

All of these points reinforce the strong beliefs that I hold about effective assessment and learning, gained through my experience as an art & design educator. They also confirm my suspicions about other popular approaches.

I have a very clear idea of how this evidence relates to the 3 year undergraduate programme that I lead, but how might it relate to learning in virtual worlds?

Open Habitat Wonderland mock-up

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

The killer apps of Wonderland are the shared browser, the whiteboard and proper voice. Second Life is rubbish at these 3 things, but it does everything else better. I don't mind using two tools.

AR 5

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

I can't quite work out what I'm going to do with this yet. As I'm on holiday, I'm just basking in the rays of massive creative potential.

AR 4

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

Crazy, crazy.

AR 3

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

How might this work in a shared 3D virtual environment? Gosh.

AR 2

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

I have a tingly sensation about this cross platform (Mac, Linux and Win) software. I sense a thousand daft and brilliant things that we could do with this technology. I've already got half an idea about making a budget 3D scanner with this.

AR 1

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

Just discovered an open source library called ARToolKit for doing crazy augmented reality stuff. The blue box ain't real, BTW.

garden-big-1

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

The original texture, before flipping.

Wonderland garden 2

cubistscarborough posted a photo:

There is a bit of room to wander around the scene before it starts to be obviously distorting. The one drawback is that any other avatars will seem to float at eye level. This won't be a problem if we replace the spooky 3D mannequins with mug-shots on a cube.