With the technologies that have been available to us for a number of years now, teaching professionals are in a strong position to significantly improve the quality of learning in both OECD and developing countries. However, the transformation of learning through the application of IT tools is far from pervasive. Why is this? In part it is about effecting a cultural shift in the understanding of where IT learning tools do and can sit within any syllabus and therefore revising customary teaching practices. In turn, this requires intelligent staff development programmes that are geared to lifelong learning (as opposed to one-off pre-service training). Each of these requires institutional development and reorganisation.
These claims that the true power of ICT in education can only be achieved through a deeper conceptual and methodological shift than has hitherto been put into practice is affirmed in a recent World Bank Report:
ICT has the potential to improve the quality of learning, expand access to learning opportunities, and increase the efficiency of administrative processes … . Before ICT can help improve learning outcomes, however, institutions must be reorganized and teachers must change the way they approach learning. [World Bank Staff, Lifelong Learning in the Global Knowledge Economy (Herndon: World Bank Publications, 2003), p.36].
But the same report also observes that bringing about such changes is by no means straightforward because of two additional very important factors in respect to teaching practitioners. “Bringing about this change in the way teachers and trainers behave”, says the report, “is difficult even in OECD countries …, partly because teachers’ motivation and needs vary depending on where they are in their careers” (op.cit., p.36).
Do you agree with these observations? Have any major factors been omitted? What are your own experiences of improving learning and assessment through ICT, either as a learner, a teacher, a trainer, a school leader or a project/programme manager?
VLE stands for Virtual Learning Environment. It is a rather glorified way of describing what is essentially (in most cases) an Intranet in an educational (as opposed to commercial) context. VLE is used interchangeably with Learning Network (LN or LEN) to refer to the same private web environment for students, staff and parents of a school, college or university.
A VLE is accessed remotely and requires secure credentials to access its resources. It will typically contain administrative and teaching resources that can be accessed at any time from anywhere and is now considered essential to the good functioning of any educational institution. Few VLEs achieve a truly virtual learning environment at present but this may well be a component of these platforms in the near future. For this reason, some practitioners prefer the term learning network over VLE.
Comments welcomed on what VLE means to you.
Objective testing and computer assisted assessment suggest a monolithic application to summative assessment regimes, but the technologies that now lie behind this form of evaluation can be marshalled to develop highly effective formative assessment methodologies and even guided study in the form of interactive learning activities.
The main difference in the creation of a summative objective test question and a guided study exercise is in the use of comprehensive help and documentation – made available to the learner during the response process – and by the addition of good, relevant, comprehensive feedback material presented to the learner immediately after their response to the stimulus text, image or other media.
Are you involved in the development of interactive learning activities? Would you like to be? What are your experiences of this to date? Do ILAs have a place in your teaching practices?
This blog category could have been entitled either “CAA” or “Objective Assessment” because technological advances in the last decade have created a convergence between the two. The term “objective assessment” or “objective test” refers to an assessment made up of a special type of question that has a pre-defined closed response. This is contrasted with its counterpart, referred to as either “extended (prose) response” or “open response/answer” where the question must be answered with a longer written response from the candidate. The notion of “objectivity” or “subjectivity” relates to the correction and marking of the assessment. Because the extended prose response can take an infinite number of forms and is discursive, the marker brings value judgements to bear during the correction process. This does not happen with an objective question – or series of them – because the response is singular and predetermined. However, it could be argued that “objective” is a misnoma, since this type of question, and the response process it requires, simply transfers the subjectivity to an earlier stage in the assessment process (at the point of the development of the question when the “correct” answer is decided and pre-defined).
An objective test question will most commonly take the form of a multiple choice question where candidates must select a “key” – one or more options that answer the question correctly. However, other objective question forms exist including (not exhaustively) matching (students must pair elements from two lists), cloze (a stimulus text or image must be completed with missing information) and target spotting (sometimes referred to as “hot spots”, candidates must identify parts of a text or image).
What is your opinion on CAA or the objective assessment form and how these might fit into teaching methodologies, syllabus design and assessment regimes? Might CAA work well with either formative or summative assessments? Does it have any distinct advantages over extended prose response formats and how migh the two work together on a syllabus? Can objective question types and CAA only work in science subjects or are they also suited to the humanities?
For more information on the development and deployment of CAA please see the Case Study in the Resources section of this site by clicking here.
HEFCE’s Assessment framework and guidance on submissions document was recently published on the HEFCE website. The document sets out the framework and generic criteria for submissions, guides institutions on policy and preparing submissions, and specifies content/data requirements/related definitions. The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) for UK higher education institutions has a submissions deadline of 29 November 2013.
HEFCE’s 2014 REF framework and guidance publication can be found here.