In todays’ higher education profession the contemporary educator is adaptive, time-limited yet overworked. The current educator/educatee dynamic sets out, in an idealistic and utopian world, to provide peer-to-peer... [ view full abstract ]
In todays’ higher education profession the contemporary educator is adaptive, time-limited yet overworked. The current educator/educatee dynamic sets out, in an idealistic and utopian world, to provide peer-to-peer educational instruction with impartial, valid, effective assessment and feedback in a timely manner (Bruner 1970). Presently these are set out in the relevant departmental programmatic curriculum reviews.
A major aspect of any curriculum or teaching programme should be the feedback and assessment strategies (Black, Wiliam 1998), the chief aim of which is to utilise the feedback as a way to provide the educator with information on how best to disseminate said knowledge to the educatee (Biggs 2011). From the educatee’s perspective the student also benefits from timely, impartial, valid, equitable and reproducible assessment and feedback strategies (Bloxham, Boyd 2007). In the authors earnest opinion this is the forte of appropriately constructed educational technology based assessments and feedback, specifically pertaining to reproducibility and impartiality.
This paper sets out to compare and contrast the traditional (pen and paper) and novel (Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and Classroom Response Systems (CRS)) methods of generating assessments and feedback available to today’s educational practitioner. Today’s educator, in an effort to escape from the time‑hungry tasks, i.e. manually creating assessments should endeavour to engage with and adapt to the use of these new technologies in the day-to-day execution of their duties. Additionally the utilisation of these systems can enhance the educatee’s feelings of autonomy, as set out in Self Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci, Ryan 1987, Hew, Kadir, Sharifah Latifah Syed Abdul 2016), accelerating their journey along the path to deep and independent learning.
The authors aim to provide a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis (Valentin 2001) through the investigation of comparable task execution durations. This will primarily be achieved through the creation of assessment tasks utilising both the aforementioned traditional and novel methodologies. It is envisaged that this will provide evidential guidance as to the efficiency of novel educational technologies over their traditional counterparts. This will not just be limited to the initial task execution but will also take into account the reprocess‑ability of each item and the subsequent time-savings associated with each future iteration.
In summary, the use of these technologies shall provide advantages to both the educator and educatee. For the educator this will reduce the time and effort in the medium term, improving rates and levels of feedback and assessment impartiality. For the educatee it provides timely, impartial and personalised feedback, ultimately leading to a more involved and integrated level of student engagement.
