Modularised approach to rethink assessment

Hi colleagues my name is Dr. Ken Cliff and thanks so much for tuning in to this presentation ‘Using a modulised approach to rethink content and to prioritize assessment’. We're all doing a lot of marking right now and you don't need to get through too many 1500-word papers before you’re quickly reminded how important good sign posting is.

So I'm going to start with my conclusion. I'll argue that breaking my subject into a series of modules has helped me to streamline content, to innovate in terms of content production, and to backwards design with content becoming the scaffolding to support subject assessments. And that little asterisk next to assessment is there to remind me to say that in a way, assessment is both the most and the least interesting part of this presentation. It's the least interesting in that I'm not actually going to talk about COVID-19 related assessment changes all that much. Instead, I'm going to try to argue that a modular approach helped me to make sure that students weren't overwhelmed or exhausted when it came time to complete the subject assessment. That content in this subject has been gradually reimagined as an array of scaffolding required for students to demonstrate their achievement of subject learning outcomes through assessment.

The case study we're looking at here is EDFE401: Sociology and Cultural Studies of Education. It's a core fourth year subject for 150 to 200 Bachelor of Primary Education students and it runs each year in autumn.

I shifted the subject to a blended design in 2018 totally eliminating live lectures and moving to two hour tutorials which take place every second week. The subject evaluations for this subject are generally pretty strong with any negative feedback mostly reflecting individual students personal learning preferences and assessment preferences rather than systematic issues with the content or the assessment in the subject. So in terms of COVID-19 readiness I was very fortunate I was working with a very experienced group of students in a subject that was already in a blended mode.

Our colleagues are using a range of different types of modules so it might be useful to explain how that term is being used in this subject and in this presentation. A module is a cohesive set of learning activities packaged together into a learning experience. There are five modules in EDFE401 and each module is worth two percent. They are slow-release that is students can't sit down and race through all the modules in week one of the semester. Similarly, there are restrictions within the modules themselves so that students move through the activities in a predefined order. So this is a pedagogical choice and there's certainly other options and ways to outline a module.

In this module you can see a topic introduction PDF right there at the top, an 11-minute mini lecture on video, a reading from the textbook, a glossary of terms, a forum post and a short quiz. The module has a firm due date and while all students can access the content in the module regardless of the date, modules must be completed on time to receive marks.

One of the things that the university has heard very clearly from students during COVID-19 is

that some felt overwhelmed by the amount of content that they needed to engage with. So how does a modularized approach help you to streamline content? Straight away we generally cut down from twelve or thirteen weekly topics to three or four or five or six modules. So, we're grouping or chunking content. Now this is a tough decision because we all love all the content in our subjects but making this decision really does help us to focus on the key areas in the key contents that are part of the subject. I'll talk about how I made those decisions a little later in the backwards design section.

In EDFE401 cutting down to five modules also really helped me to move the subject from a weekly schedule to a fortnightly schedule. this slows down the pace a little for everyone students and staff alike you can be a little slow off the mark getting into some work in a module for example, and still find that you have plenty of time in that particular fortnightly cycle to do all the things you need to do. This approach was great for a COVID-19 environment because I'd already done away with lectures and so I had no need to go and spend time re-recording them or to introduce live lectures because I was confident the material was captured in the modules. Perhaps more controversially, I didn't introduce live tutorials either. Again, I was confident that each module could be fine-tuned to add an extra activity, or to promote students to engage with each other a little more, or to go the other way and to include an extra mini lecture for example to better explain a concept. So I really doubled down on the module which made things very straightforward for students. Everything is in the module.

We then offer drop-in sessions via zoom for those students that wanted to ask live questions. We made extensive use of the subject discussion forum and as I mentioned earlier all this helped us to ensure that assessment was front and center throughout the subject.

The outcomes of this decision appeared to be pretty good. Students didn't seem overwhelmed in this particular subject. There wasn't any widespread confusion about what needed to be done or when it was due or if there were marks associated with it. Importantly, module completion was pretty much exactly where it had been in previous years, that is, approximately 90% of students completed each and every module.

We also got a little bit of nice feedback along the way. Though it's important to bear in mind that I've totally cherry picked that comment. That's from a student who had two young children in her care, a partner who was off working and for whom modules suited her down to the ground.

In my introduction I noted that a modular approach didn't just help to ensure students weren't overwhelmed. It also helped me to think innovatively about content and activities and how I could ensure engagement and strong scaffolding for my students. Like many of you I've found shorter videos, whether for lectures or for how-to videos, seem to work better than longer ones.

I've also been able to experiment more with more active style learning tasks, such as incorporating a survey or a video posting requirement into modules. In the bottom left corner you can see a table of data that I actually created using surveys that my students conducted with their friends and family. That survey data was then fed back to students through a mini video in which I captured the data once it had been synthesized. On the bottom right you can see a video posting and the beginnings of a subsequent forum discussion about that post. And in the middle you can see a true/false quiz with the yellow section showing the instant feedback that students can receive and how this might point them in the direction to follow up on another concept, or to check on a particular page of the textbook if they need to clarify something.

With these areas under control so to speak it also gave me some time and some thinking room importantly to consider what else might help to hook and to engage my students. So keep them thinking about the topic and not just thinking about how quickly they could get through a module.

I used the COVID recess to launch a podcast and the podcast had five episodes - The sociology of ed pod, one podcast episode per module. Each episode runs for fifteen to twenty minutes. It features three recurring segments and involves staff from the subject. The podcast is available on Apple podcasts and in Spotify but despite the big effort I put in to make it happen on those platforms it turns out that just as many students listen through the player that's embedded in Moodle. So you definitely can't win them all. Each episode is about a hundred listens out of 150 students in the subject this year and we've had some nice feedback from students about the podcast being entertaining, interesting and easily accessible. Again it's also a strategic approach to content production. The podcast content has been recorded so that it's evergreen, meaning we can use it for the next few years regardless of whether we're delivering remote, on campus or in distance mode.

As I said in my introduction, in a way the assessment story here is a pretty boring one. indeed I haven't spoken that much about assessment at all I suppose. The more generous reading however, is that the flexibility of these modules allowed me to put that together with some related decisions that I made in terms of COVID-19 delivery and through that to retain the rigor, the integrity and the diversity of assessment that we had in the subject. A big part of this comes from the backwards design approach that I've taken within the subject. It's not something that's overly evident here. In large part because actually a lot of that decision-making predates COVID-19, but it is a philosophy that I kept at the front of my thinking as I made each little covert related adjustment. And what you can see through this fancy little diagram with its arrows and boxes is the way that assessment tasks were actually backward mapped to the modules to ensure that the requisite content, skills and working processes were covered and practiced. This approach to design seemed helpful again in ensuring that students could meet subject learning outcomes, mostly without them being overwhelmed, confused or distracted by the demands of keeping up with non-assessment related aspects in the subject.

This shouldn't be read without some caveats however, so here's a couple that come to mind quickly.

Completion does not equal engagement or stay out of the Moodle logs I can certainly tell you times I've waded into the Moodle logs for the modules and I've seen people burn through a module in you know 30 minutes flat even with various restrictions that I pop on different activities to try to perhaps slow them down a little bit or make sure they complete each thing. So certainly no module however well-designed is going to guarantee engagement. It is the equivalent of a student sitting at the back of the lecture theater you know looking like they're there but actually being way off elsewhere on their laptop.

No one ever saved very much time by switching to modules. Now this one's debatable I think in the long run it is particularly if you're smart about how you do things it is a time saver, but Initially, module design or redesign is really front-end loaded which is you've got to sync a whole bunch of time into switching to a modular style delivery. A lot of thinking time and then a lot of doing time and I say that as someone who thinks of himself has been fairly tech savvy and fairly Moodle savvy. There's quite a lot of doing time attached to this as well.

Like all learning and teaching decisions modules need to be underpinned by a pedagogical philosophy. You need to know what you want to do and why you want to do it. And certainly I found personally that's speaking to colleagues in my school and my faculty as well as more broadly across the uni has really helped me to refine my thinking about what I want to do in my subjects but particularly in this specific area where you need to really have a clear idea of what you want the modules to do and how they're going to do it.

I want to thank everyone for tuning in today. I hope it's been a useful presentation. Thanks.