Semi-plenaries II (1 x 60 minutes)

Friday, February 10, 2017, 09h30 - 10h30, Red Building, Università della Svizzera italiana

 

Room A11:

E-portfolio as a framework for formative assessment

Sabina Staub, Sebastian Jünger, Lynn Williams, PH FHNW

At the secondary school institute of the PH FHNW an e-portfolio application (portfolio.switch.ch) has been introduced to support the compulsory mentoring scheme during students' professional studies. Shifting portfolio work into the digital age enables more immediate and frequent feedback between mentor and mentee. With regard to reflection and development, this opens up an avenue towards a more formative regular assessment of portfolio work instead of the summative assessment of a fixed and final submission document. In this session we will present first experiences from two perspectives: 1) Introducing pre-service teachers to the use of an e-portfolio: What needs to be considered? What qualitative and quantitative criteria are necessary in peer feedback settings? 2) Introducing lecturers to the use of an e-portfolio: What are the benefits and challenges involved in giving feedback with a digital tool? How can comments be structured to support the quality of reflection and professionalisation?

 

Room A21:

BeAxi e-assessment OR overcoming the most common fears of e-assessments

Daniel Kohler, UNIBAS

With a growing number of educational institutions nowadays conducting electronic exams in one way or another e-assessments are becoming increasingly popular. Enabling the usage of innovative multimedia questions, reducing correction efforts and easy archiving are only some of the core benefits why this particular form of examinations gains that much momentum. Despite the mentioned advantages, some people fear to make the change towards digital assessments – why is that?

On the example of the e-assessment solution BeAxi (http://www.beaxi.com), we report on the most commonly met prejudices against e-assessments, the reasons why we think they are overrated and ultimately present the opportunities, which by conducting mobile e-assessments with iPads outweigh the anticipated risks.

 

Room A12:

Facing the challenge of correcting and assessing text assignments in Moodle

Céline Restrepo Zea, Thierry Hermann, UNIL

Tools to provide feedback on writing tasks have been of concern for some years at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lausanne. Depending on the context, different pedagogical scenarios have emerged, each with specific challenges to answer. These have led to the development of three different tools, all of them developed as additional functionalities of Moodle:

  1. Extension to the Moodle Atto HTML editor: creation of a functionality that allows teachers to add correction marks directly in the student texts produced with the Moodle editor.
  2. Activity "Journal d’apprentissage": students write articles based on canvas predefined by their teacher. Each intervention in the article generates a new version of the article, which allows students and teachers to follow the writing process.
  3. Marking palette for the PDF annotator available in Moodle assignments: since Moodle 3.1, the PDF annotator interface, which allows teachers to annotate directly on the student’s submission, is automatically offered. A marking palette, which is easily configurable, has been developed as part of a UNIL pedagogical innovative funding programme.

We propose to present and discuss these tools during this session.