With blended learning becoming more integrated into higher education curriculum, colleges and universities have embraced technology tools to ensure to maintain fair assessment processes.
Higher education leaders recently gathered to discuss the current state of assessment at Fierce Education’s virtual event, Higher Education: Technology Profiles in Success — Spring. The session, Assessing Assessment: Evaluating Learning while Maintaining Academic Integrity, sponsored by Labster and Honorlock, took a look at Lindenwood University’s implementation of strategies designed to better measure students' understanding and assimilation of the course material.
Lindenwood University shared the challenges and lessons they went through during the pandemic and how they helped to develop their new assessment model. The article on the presentation is here.
Following the presentation, Elliot Markowitz, Head of Content at Fierce Education, moderated a discussion where Mark Fuller, Product Marketing Director at Labster and Tyler Stike, Director of Content at Honorlock joined T.J. Rains, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO at Lindenwood University, to bring onto the table their insight from the education technology industry perspective.
How proctoring software can help instructors during the assessment process
Online proctoring services with AI-powered tools enable students to take remote exams. How can instructors better assess student performance?
According to Honorlock’s Stike, instructors can do a lot from the technology standpoint and also from the processes they have already in place. For Stike, having an incremental approach is rather important, not only for the student experience but also for the instructors. “If the students are doing a portfolio and they have to present it, and that is part of the authentic assessment, that’s a really big undertaking. If they are able to break that into chunks and get feedback along the way, that's a better learning experience for them and a better outcome that they are submitting,” he said.
When using proctoring software, it is important that instructors pay attention to the way they are submitting the actual questions: the rubrics, the instructions, and all need to be really specific. Clarity in instruction of the assignment will help students avoid confusion and waste time. Tyler Stike recommends including specifics such as how many paragraphs, how many words and pages an essay should have, what format students should use, and so on. “This will help them during the process,” he says.
At the time of assessing, “with online proctoring services you can have voice detection, and instead of watching an entire presentation or demonstration you can have a transcript of what they are saying; so you can quickly look through it, scan the document, make sure they are heading on the right points instead of watching something that could have a lot of filler talk,” Stike said.
Assessing in the Web environment: Virtual Labs
Virtual Labs can enhance critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, and conceptual understanding. But how can instructors speed up the grading time in the Web environment?
For Mark Fuller, despite technology can play an important role in finding deficiencies, there are things that technology cannot solve. “If you consider something like testing someone’s skills in a virtual lab, with virtual lab simulations, how do you assess someone’s abilities when it comes to conducting a particular type of laboratory or scientific technique or lab protocol?”
Fuller explains that there are ways in which automated grading opportunities or even learning analytics can help instructors see where a student was struggling, or where students were having some trouble in a particular task, or with a particular concept. This can be incredibly helpful, but to have a system in place can speed up things a little bit and be useful.
Student cheating: How do you protect against that?
According to Fuller, there are different components of how instructors can respond to the potential academic integrity issues and cheating including:
- Mixing assessment types (not only multiple-choice in a final exam)
- Introducing experiential opportunities such as peer review or feedback
- Different assignments from semester to semester, perhaps even different between students, customizing assessments
- Randomized quiz questions with the help of technology
- Proctoring technology to refresh questions every time it is asked
For Fuller, part of the role here is for faculty to establish a learning contract with the students from the very beginning. “Technology can do as much as it possibly can, but there needs to be an established understanding of what is Okay and what is not Okay. After all, the goal is for the students to learn and not just to pass the class.”
Stike added that there is technology that faculty can put in place such as the browser lock, monitoring behavior, and establishing which resources are allowed and which are not can also prevent someone from just copying and pasting.
Proctoring group projects: Making sure there is credibility and integrity
“The type of questions you are asking from your students should really push them toward genuine knowledge, not just regurgitating information. I think that’s equally important as the technology you have in place to make sure some of those resources are being used throughout,” Stike said.
For Fuller, “there is assessment of knowledge, and there is assessment for learning. When this is put into use to help students, instructors can see and flag where students are having some struggle, so they can have some kind of intervention. Learning and retaining is, after all, the goal of the students.”
Virtual labs: Understanding the Web environment and how a one-time assessment can lead to dropouts
A virtual lab allows the instructor to monitor 40 students in a lab space, something it would be impossible to do in person. Someone taking too much time on a task does not necessarily mean the student is cheating; it could mean the student is facing a problem and needs help. “Understanding that level of analytics in the backend in a Web environment really helps you learn things that you couldn’t necessarily learn if you are 100 percent in person all the time,” said Fuller.
The fact that you can automate grading with the online tools lets faculty get some scorekeeping to learn where students are, especially when preparing them for in-person experience, he said.
“STEM dropout rates for first year students are really bad,” said Fuller. “There are a lot of problems with equity in our science programs, you lose a lot of people, and I think assessment is, unfortunately, a part of that, because people get discouraged doing poorly in the first week of the Web lab course and they drop-out, and they don’t pursue that anymore. Assessment must be more varied than a simple one-time big exam, which is really powerful.”
“Grading is important. And some online, whether virtual labs or other types of technologies can help in the process of bringing more people along.”
The blended learning reality shows that faculty members have to wear multiple hats/ They have to be subject matter experts, facilitators, and technologists. Faculty become partners with IT and with vendors. All together, they can better spot where the gaps are and how they can collaborate in order to close those gaps.
Register to watch this full session on-demand here.
For other sessions from the event see:
Assessing College and University Students in Blended Learning Environments
Technology Critical to Facilitate Higher Education Decision-Making