Abstract
Educational commentators have offered many pedagogical rationales for using Web 2.0 to support learning in higher education, and academics are being encouraged to find ways for their students to use social web technologies. Questions arise as to the value of these activities compared to more conventional assignments, and whether implementing such changes to student assessment is worth the effort. We conducted a survey of academics’ assessment of students’ Web 2.0 activities in Australian universities and found that this form of assessment is being conducted by a small number of academics, in a range of fields of study, but mainly in Humanities and Social Sciences, with varying kinds of intended and actual learning outcomes. Blogging and wiki-writing predominate, low and medium-stakes assessment are most common, and different methods of marking and feedback are in use. Qualitative feedback from the survey and follow-up interviews gave further insights into benefits and challenges ofWeb 2.0 assessment in relation to pedagogy, policy and practice. It appears that academics’ conservative approaches to conducting assessment and their novice approaches to utilising social web technologies are factors which seriously limit realising the potential of Web 2.0 for medium or high-stakes assessment.Keywords: assessment; assignments; higher education; social web; Web 2.0(Published: 3 February 2012)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20: 16153 - DOI: 10.3402/rlt.v20i0/16153
Highlights
When introducing a new assignment to university students, academics routinely encounter the question, ‘What’s it worth?’ as students calculate how much of their overall result for the subject is at stake
Designing the assignment Findings about the design of Web 2.0 assignments give a mixed picture of the extent to which academics are attributing value to such approaches
As Interviewee 13 stressed: I tell the students over and over again that it is on the World Wide Web, it’s not associated with the university, be careful what you put up there, make sure you are comfortable with this. These findings show that academics have found many features that are worthwhile, and many ways to see value in designing, conducting, marking and managing student Web 2.0 assignments
Summary
When introducing a new assignment to university students, academics routinely encounter the question, ‘What’s it worth?’ as students calculate how much of their overall result for the subject is at stake. Most published accounts of Web 2.0 pedagogies in higher education have described only formative assessment (i.e. providing feedback on work in progress so that a student can improve it before it is marked or graded) or low stakes assessment (i.e. earning marks that make very little impact on the student’s overall standing), according to Gray et al (2010). Most of this literature has overlooked the issue of summative, high stakes assessment, or has described it theoretically Á for example, ‘working with a set of circumstances rather than trying to control or alter them’ Most of this literature has overlooked the issue of summative, high stakes assessment, or has described it theoretically Á for example, ‘working with a set of circumstances rather than trying to control or alter them’ (Hughes 2009, p. 30); and ‘capturing the visible evidence of invisible learning’ (Bass and Eynon 2009, p. 4)
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