Nobody's perfect: video as a tool for rapid formative assessment

It is hard to overestimate the importance of assessment for the learning process. Assessment truly dictates what our learners understand their role and, consequently, how they spend their time: be it in tasks of rote learning... [ view full abstract ]

It is hard to overestimate the importance of assessment for the learning process. Assessment truly dictates what our learners understand their role and, consequently, how they spend their time: be it in tasks of rote learning or critical reflection and collaborative learning, or, as phenomenographical research suggests, in surface or deep learning approaches. Assessment regimes, however, tend, for various reasons, to be quite conservative and to rely most conspicuously on high stakes summative written examinations. In this context the paper considers the use of a new video-based "assessment productivity" solution as a way to support an assessment process that is radically formative.
Fields in which video is used successfully and effectively as a tool for assessment are reviewed at the outset, with rich and varying practices across fields as diverse as medicine, music, language learning, sport science and teaching being highlighted. This review gives way to consideration in more detail of the “RedInk” assessment tool, a tool, currently in beta mode, designed to overcome known barriers to the use of video for assessments through provision, inter alia, for crowdsourcing and sharing of marking schemes and rubrics for application to video content, the creation and sharing of granular time-based feedback, and support for reliability assurance. Taken together these features support an assessment process that radically blurs the traditional line between the facilitation of learning and its assessment, a form of assessment that isn’t just about providing information to students as to how they’re doing on their chosen course of study -- as formative assessment is sometimes, weakly, operationalised -- but which encourages them to create learning evidence and resources for future learning as they learn and which embeds the learning inside the assessment.
The paper concludes with a look at related technologies and trends such as 360-degree video and virtual reality devices as well as the emergence and increasing availability and interoperability of higher fidelity video formats such as Ultra HD, which serve to address some traditional limitations of video and to make the format even more attractive as a tool for assessment and transformation.