Assessment engines

I've just been making final tweaks to the module website for our next (3rd!) presentation.  We've been able to streamline the early weeks a little, and have also added some material in a new FAQs section.  One of the things it's brought home to me yet again is just how much work goes into assessing student projects, and how many people are involved.  The trigger for thinking about this was having to explain that: 

Unfortunately that you can't make your videos 'private' and nominate who can watch them.  Your EMA films need to be accessible to all the people involved in the assessment systems, and we can't always name all the people you'd need to make it accessibe to before you submit.

The issue is that as well as first and second markers, the curriculum manager and the exam board, there are all sorts of other bits and pieces of the university with a legitimate interest in looking at student work - students services, projects and portfolios, etc. etc. and that's before we get into the territory of appeals, plagiarism and other queries that need to be investigated.

The positive side of all this is that I'm proud to work somewhere that takes assessment very seriously and puts a lot of staff time into being able to be sure our grades reflect the great work our students do.  Unfortunately it means I can't provide a list of everyone who might need to look at a video in advance.

Enthusiasm

Since I joined the OU staff 8 years ago, there's a been a decline in the number of opportunities to meet students at summer school.  This is a pity because it was always a great opportunity to meet students who are enthusiastic about their studies.  One of the joys of T156 is that the forums brim with enthusiasm and you get a peek at some of our students other interests through the magic of video.

This piece was a beauty and produced a lovely and occasionally surreal thread in the forum:

Making a film bag from PaulaJT156 on Vimeo.

Posting work live to the internet

Our intention from the very beginnings of T156 was to have students work in conditions that matched the environment in which they could reasonably be expected to make films afterwards.  This is reflected in the task briefs, the steer towards solving problems through asking for help from those who're able and willing to provide it, and building up confidence and trust so that feedback is helpful for improvement rather than threatening.

One of the things we are going to have to sharpen up on is making clearer that we expect students to post their work live on the internet.  The most practical reason is that we can't compete with the likes of YouTube for development time and server space to produce an easy platform for uploading video that looks good across a big range of input file types.  In a followup course it might be worth insisting on ogg files of less than 7MB for sharing, but it would be valuable for the challenge rather than because it matches the way most video is distributed these days.

However, it's also valuable for the challenge it presents.  There's some emotional work to be done in making your work public.  It puts an honesty and a discipline to the process.  Not all students are keen to use video in this way, and of course we'd rather negotiate something with them that works well enough.  But the preference is still very much oriented towards putting work online and seeing what the reaction is.