Piloting Online Submission and Online Assessment with GradeMark

Online technologies are becoming ubiquitous in higher education and present both challenges and opportunities for those involved in learning and teaching. This chapter reports on the research-enhanced implementation of Electronic Assessment Management (EAM) within one faculty of a university in Sydney, Australia. This research was conducted as a qualitative case study. Questionnaires were used to investigate staff and student experiences of EAM, and the researcher's reflective practice made it possible to capture important details of the implementation process mediated through the researchers as participants. The research found enormous potential in EAM implementation for cultural transformation in learning and teaching. The authors argue that the move to EAM is now a viable option for universities. The combination of a rapidly evolving higher education landscape, evidence from exploring both staff and student experiences of engaging with EAM, and the benefits which the transition offers for the professional development of academics make the use of EAM essential for reasons of both pedagogy and efficiency.

Assessing Spatial Design in Virtual Environments

There is growing interest in adopting three-dimensional virtual environments within spatial design courses to use digital modelling techniques to support students' learning. One pedagogical issue that has received little attention so far is the question of how 3D virtual environments can be used to implement assessment techniques that support students' learning of spatial design expertise. This chapter seeks to assist spatial design educators who are considering digital modelling by presenting two case studies that highlight assessment practices within spatial design courses using virtual environments. Rubrics and student work samples are included. These courses both involve students creating architectural designs within virtual environments, yet contrast in several ways: learning outcomes, 3D modelling technologies, and student cohorts. The cases examine how the affordances of virtual environments for iterative, immersive, and collaborative design can enable formative and summative assessment, with both design process and the final artefact playing important roles.

Identifying Group Processes and Affect in Learners

In the last five years, the analytical techniques for identifying the processes of online learning have developed to the point where applications for the assessment of learning can be discussed. This would be most appropriate for twenty-first century skills—such as collaboration, decision-making, and teamwork skills—which are the core learning outcomes in immersive learning environments. The state of the art in this field is still at the stage of discovering patterns of the processes of learning, identifying stages, and suggesting their meaning. However, already it is important to consider what technologies can offer and what information teachers need in order to evaluate students' situated performance and to provide useful feedback. This chapter describes an imagined virtual world, one that affords the range of twenty-first century skills, in order to illustrate types of analyes that could be conducted on learning process data. Such analytical methods could provide both descriptive information about the performance of learners and depict structures and patterns of their learning processes. The future assessment of learning in immersive virtual worlds may draw on data about deep embodied processes and multiple senses that usually underpin professional skills, such as affect, visual perception, and movement. This type of assessment could also provide deeper insights into many psychological processes in collaborative learning, decision-making, and problem-solving in virtual worlds, such as motivation, self-efficacy, and engagement. Overall, the view of the assessment presented in this chapter extends beyond the formal learning outcomes that are usually required by tertiary education quality and standards agencies and assessed in traditional courses in higher education to include a range of new capacities that may not be required but are essential for successful performance in contemporary workplaces.

Methods for Assessing 3D Virtual Worlds in Design Education

With the advancement and increasing adoption of information and communication technologies, 3D virtual worlds, being a part of these revolutionary forces, have the potential to make a major contribution to design education as a new teaching and learning environment. Considering this changing trend, we have been employing 3D virtual worlds in the design curriculum over the past decade. To critically understand the impact of the technologies on design education, this chapter explores and demonstrates three different assessment methods of 3D virtual worlds in design education, through three case studies. The chapter also concludes with insights into the applications of virtual environments in collaborative design teaching.

Factors Shaping Assessment Design in the Virtual Environment

The Virtual Birth Centre was created to provide student midwives with an opportunity to develop their midwifery knowledge and skills through a variety of teaching and learning strategies including role-play with peers in a safe, flexible, immersive learning environment. Role-play in the virtual environment has been shown to create a sense of presence or “really being there,” which is associated with increased knowledge transfer from virtual to real world. Assessment in this project focused on formative “service user” (peer) feedback along with self-assessment against midwifery professional standards. The approach to assessment was shaped by a number of factors including the philosophical underpinnings and pedagogy of the programmes involved and the opportunities and limitations of the virtual world environment. Using the Virtual Birth Centre and midwifery as a case study, this chapter explores the factors influencing the development of assessments for the practice discipline of midwifery in a simulated, virtual environment.

Using Discourse Analysis to Assess Student Problem-Solving in a Virtual World

Finding effective ways to measure student learning has been an enduring issue across the higher education sector. While much attention has been placed on the integration of technologies to support learning, not as much attention has focused on how these tools may also provide opportunities for the assessment of learning. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how an analysis of students' real-time communication can be used to identify strategies that may contribute to the arrival at a problem solution. The authors argue that parts of speech and how the language can be used to help student organise their collaborations can be applied to learning and teaching contexts, as the rules of a language are fairly stable. Hence, discourse analysis can be used to inform the design of learning activities and assessment.

Second Life for Assessing Postgraduate Learning

This case describes how an assessment task for a postgraduate unit (Information Systems in Business) was developed and delivered using the virtual world platform Second Life. Students investigated and reflected upon the appropriateness of particular technologies for organizations and in particular for an insurance company. The assessment task was undertaken twice during 2010 and reflections from the students on their learning in relation to this task are included. The lecturer also reflected on the students' learning and application of technology skills, and these two sets of reflections were triangulated with data collected in a survey of the two student cohorts. Emergent themes from the data included graphics and interface, ease of use, game versus virtual world, business context usefulness, and social network characteristics, and these are discussed. Implications for designing authentic learning and assessment tasks with virtual worlds in a higher education context are explored in this chapter. The authors conclude that virtual worlds are a suitable application to support students learning of content knowledge, providing the technology is constructively aligned with the curriculum.