Combining Novel Pedagogic and IT Approaches to Align the Assessment of Workplace Learning with Criteria for Academic Credit
المؤلف:
Stephen Gomez & David Lush
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P327-C28
2025-07-28
443
Combining Novel Pedagogic and IT Approaches to Align the Assessment of Workplace Learning with Criteria for Academic Credit
Employability of graduates is high on the agenda of both the UK Government (UK Government's White Paper on Higher Education, 2003) and HE Institutions (Knight & Yorke, 2002). Arguably, there is no better way to prepare graduates for the world of work than to integrate work experience within degree programs (Hills et al., 2004). Professional courses, such as medicine, nursing, construction and engineering, etc. already demand the integration of practice with theory. For many non-professional degrees, work placements are either absent or optional.
We run science Sandwich degrees in which students go on placement for the third year of the four year program. As the placement year offered a highly diverse experience to the student group, assessment for academic credit was difficult. Therefore, the Sandwich year attracted only a notional 120 "p" credits which did not contribute to the degree classification but did confer the title "Sandwich" on the degree. Although not rewarded with academic credit, students benefited enormously from their experience in terms of networking, having greater employability prospects, being better prepared for the final year and improving their academic performance (Gomez, 2004).
Over the years the quality of the placements offered to the students has improved to the extent that many students work at graduate level and an increasing number are co-authors of publications arising from their placement work. Given the students' involvement in cutting edge research and industrial activities, we felt that this high calibre of learning on placement was not being adequately represented by the notional "p" credit awarded to the Sandwich year. This undervaluing of the academic worth of the placement year compared to the taught parts of the degree was also thought to be partly responsible for the increasing proportion of students who were exempting themselves from the placement year.
We therefore decided to address the issue of credit-rating our Sandwich year by producing a transparent, pedagogic system for accrediting work placements that would be generic enough to be adopted by other disciplines. We discuss the rational underpinning the pedagogic assessment model we devised and provides details of the IT solution we created to make the pedagogic approach workable.
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