Conceptualizing Assessment for Online Delivery: Educational Developers Perspectives
المؤلف:
Peter Donnan & Christine Brown & Gwyn Brickell
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P432-C36
2025-08-16
576
Conceptualizing Assessment for Online Delivery: Educational Developers' Perspectives
This topic is part of a larger ongoing doctoral project that is a qualitative study of educational developers in six Australian universities, focusing on their perspectives about assessment when it is conducted partially/ blended or fully online. Each of the roles of the six participants in one way or another is involved with the integration of ICT into learning and teaching in their respective institutions. In Australian higher education institutions educational developers work with a cross section of teaching staff from a broad range of disciplines and therefore they encapsulate a rich repository of perspectives and experience on teaching, learning and assessment.
Assessment practices involving online delivery are rap idly evolving in universities and catalysts in this growth phase have been the adoption of commercial learning management systems such as WebCT, Blackboard and open-source systems such as Moodle. Assessment is a critical point of intersection for learning and teaching but it is unclear however whether educational developers' advice in relation to e-assessment simply replicates established thinking about assessment or whether it incorporates new perspectives closely linked with the nature of the technology and the nature of learning online.
Adoption of educational technology to mediate learning, teaching, and assessment is a complex process. According to Reeves (2003) assessment is a weak component in both traditional and digital education and Mason's (1998, Section 11, C) view is that
Current assessment practices in higher education are long overdue for a rethink.....[and] many online courses are leading the way in devising assignments and assessment procedures which reflect the call for higher education to teach IT literacy, team working ability and knowledge management skills.
In the transfer of assessment to online environments Dunn, Morgan, O'Reilly and Parry (2004) pose four questions that confront teachers and are certainly of concern to educational developers:
• What kinds of new learning and assessment opportunities arise in this environment?
• What pedagogies support meaningful online assessment?
• What are the losses and gains of this medium?
• Do old models and forms of assessment translate effectively into this environment? (p. 39)
Although James, McInnes and Devlin (2002, p. 4) note that extensive experimentation is occurring in Australian universities around effective and efficient on-line assessment Mason (2001) detects
...confusion over the term online assessment. At one end of the spectrum, there is web-based assessment, which usually describes various types of multiple-choice questions delivered on the Web and marked electronically. These types of questions have become very sophisticated and the presentations can draw on the full graphical and multimedia potential of the Web.....At the other end of the spectrum are individual learning contracts, negotiated online with the tutor. These are generally regarded as hard work by students, but immensely rewarding. They are also very time consuming for tutors to manage and mark. In the middle are various forms of collaborative assignments which build on both the communicative and the resource-based potential of the Web. (p. 30)
Beetham et al. (2001) reported on a Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) study in UK universities that audited twenty-three institutions and included a role analysis of thirty-five individuals associated with the embedding, development and support of learning technology in higher education. An important implication for educational developers highlighted in the report was that:
Educational developers have a critical role to play in supporting and facilitating the new specialists to acquire the core educational development and "change agent" skills needed to assist in the process. However educational developers must also ensure that they acquire skills in learning technology in order to be effective in supporting these new methods. (Beetham et al., 2001, p.3).
Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy and Beach (2006) observe that many educational developers are also concerned about what they see as an over-reliance on technology, as the teaching and learning approach that everyone must adopt.
One of the clearest findings to emerge from an Australian study of online education conducted by Postle et al. (2003) was the lack of any pedagogical framework for online education. Given the increasing adoption of online elements in many courses, coupled with the critical role of assessment, this is a significant field of investigation.
While there are certainly studies on the intersection of assessment, online assessment and educational development (Dunn, Morgan, O'Reilly and Parry, 2004; Mason, 2001; McNaught, 2001, 2005; Shephard, 2004) there are few extensive qualitative studies that focus principally on the perspectives of educational developers and in that sense, it is an under-researched area.
The general problem which we focus on then is how do educational developers structure their thinking about assessment when online components are introduced? What in fact are the critical elements in the thinking that underpins the design and delivery of educational development in the area of e-assessment?
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