Replacing ‘disposable assignments’ for ‘open assignments’: a solution to increase student experience and engagement.
Reflection since first blog (#OKHE1)
While writing my first blog for this publication (and my PGCert assignment), I had great plans to be more open and write blogs to enhance my research profile and the teaching and learning environment that I provide to my students. I tweet and engage with the media for my research activities but less so for teaching and learning activities. Three months later and this is yet to materialise, opps! As a health psychologist, I should practice what I preach and engage behaviour change theory to make openness part of my research and teaching activities without any additional effort. On reflection, two barriers have stood in my way and are the same two that I could have foreseen and thus planned to overcome three months ago if I had acted as I advise other people to do and set an action plan! These barriers are things that are not going to change anytime soon and I think ring true with many academics:
- A lack of time to dedicate to this ‘extra’ activity. Every summer, I have a really long list of things I want to achieve whilst I am not teaching. However, every summer flies by and the list is not complete and then items drop down the priority list when the teaching semester stars back up again. I also need to work on my views towards this activity as I still view it is an ‘extra’ thing to do but instead it should be seen as part of my everyday academic practice. To-do lists are my best friend but I am terrible at saying no which just adds to my to-do list at a faster rate than things leave it.
- My inability to write in an interesting but not self-centred manner. Blogs being self-centred were discussed in the blog by Sara Smith and is something I am very aware of when reading blogs and tweets. When tweeting about a personal work achievement, I find it quite uncomfortable as it feels like self-promotion which is not something that goes hand-in-hand with British culture. The right balance between discussing one’s own research and not sounding like you are blowing your own trumpet is a fine act to achieve in teaching. This can be picked up by students in their unit feedback in regards in terms of how much the lecturer focuses on their personal research and experiences.
So for my second blog in this publication (and for my PGCert assignment), I have decided to take a different approach and rather than try and shoehorn openness into my teaching practice, I thought I would think more practically in terms of making my teaching practice more open. This second blog is required to be more critical of openness and relate to current policies and cultures in higher education rather than just my local professional practice. I will still draw on my professional practice but will try to move beyond just this and view my critical reflection in the wider higher education arena.
Every summer, academic’s review the content of the courses and make edits to content and delivery for the new semester and cohort. Every year, I consider ways to update my assignments and methods of giving feedback but as yet have considered openness as a feature of this so I decided to focus my reading for this blog on just that so that my reflections have reach to all academics in higher education. Kenneth Grieve’s blog got me thinking about what is an ‘open’ assignment and how I could integrate this into my teaching. In the blog, Dr Grieve discussed booking a computer cluster and setting a question that students have to answer by demonstrating an ability to critically review the available literature (of which there would be loads as they would have access to the Internet during the assessment) and present a coherent answer that addresses the question. This got me thinking about changing the student culture and polices in higher education and the impact of these on assignments and openness.
Digital culture of learning for students
Constructivism views learning as an active process involving socio-cultural background, cognitive ability and social interaction. Knowledge is constructed based on the meaning we attribute to observations and interactions. Constructivism was influenced by Vgyotsky’s sociocultural theory of cognitive development a theory widely studied in psychology. I particularly like this theory as it highlights the important of culture and social influences on learning. Thus, to fully engage students in the learning process, we need to embed the digital culture that influences their everyday life into the teaching and learning environment that we create.
Students are growing up in an ‘open world’ and information for their University assignments is mostly gathered online as opposed to physically searching a library. I can understand this to an extent, I spent my undergraduate University days both manually searching for journal articles and online on a computer but moved to online only for my PhD. One added difference is the role of social media in student’s lives and their study. Social media is important to students, as demonstrated in a recent poll which found that students’ viewed access to social media as an important perk of a job. It must be stated here that this survey was conducted online so has a slightly biased sample in terms of Internet use but the point is still relevant.
Merging the digital culture of students with assignments: the influence of higher education policy
As academics we need to make sure that the teaching and learning environment we provide are in touch with the digital world in which our students live. Many of us have considered and introduced ways to be more open in our teaching so we now we need to consider how to include openness in the assignments that we set. Assignments are a key part of the teaching and learning experience for students and staff. Students are focused on success in assignments and staff want to make sure that they set assignments that meet the unit learning outcomes. To merge the digital culture of our students with the types of assignments we develop, we need to think about embedding assignments in the ‘open’ information culture in which our students (and we) live.
The teaching excellence framework (TEF) will soon come into action (as a pilot) in higher education to measure teaching quality so will influence all academics. Although we do not quite know what metrics will be used, we all have some ideas and student experience and engagement are likely to included, as one of its aims is:
The National Student Survey (NSS) is currently used in higher education in the UK as a measure of student satisfaction (with much debate!) and asks students questions about their experiences of
‘assessments and feedback’.
Likewise, setting assignment and providing feedback are key academic skills stated in the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF). The UKPSF criterion must be met when an academic applies for a Higher Educational fellowship acting as a benchmark for teaching practice:
‘A3 – assess and give feedback to learners’.
Thus, assignments and feedback are key elements of the teaching and learning experience for students and staff. Both student satisfaction and teaching qualifications are likely to be in the TEF metric so the role of assignments and feedback is important and the role of ‘openness’ in them must be examined.
Good bye to ‘disposable assignments’
After much reading on this topic (in the digital arena of course!), I decided that it is ‘disposable assignments’ that need to be replaced with ‘open assignments’. The term ‘disposable assignments’ is used by David Wiley to categorises assignments that do not have any value other than getting credits to pass your University degree and as a result are hated by staff and students.
In many subjects in academia, it is common to have a coursework essay and exam (multiple choice questions, short questions or essay questions). Both of which can feel rather ‘disposable’ as you simply regurgitate the information you remember from your reading and lectures. Thinking back to my BSc Psychology days, I remember one assignment as it was different to the rest and evoked interest due to deep learning, it involved us attending weekly lectures that covered a different pre-selected peer-reviewed journal article each week. In the exam, we critically reviewed an article in terms of the study methodology. I really enjoyed this assignment as I could prepare well in advance of the exam (yes, I am a control freak!) and it felt more like a real life task as you were able to select which article to focus on and take your notes on the pre-read article into the exam. I suppose this is a form of an ‘open book exam’. An open book exam requires you to be organised in terms of note taking so that when you are in the exam your notes are easily accessible to you. Thus, it tests your preparation skills and also your skills of constructing an answer that addresses the question given in the exam. This type of exam encourages deep learning which is unique to exams which typical encourage rote learning but unless it is online then I am not sure it is fully ‘open’. Online exams are not new and are not without problems (including IT performance and resources) and I am not sure this is what students or lecturing staff want to make assignments open.
For the first time last year, I ran an MSc assignment as a weekly portfolio (it was previously the ‘disposable’ pairing of an essay and exam). The unit in which this assignment sits is in the first semester of the student’s study and introduces them to the influence of society on health (behaviours and outcomes) and M-Level study. At the start of the semester, students were given ten weekly tasks which build on the knowledge taught in the lecture. I had previously given these tasks as homework on the BlackBoard Discussion board and found that students engaged in them and enjoyed doing them so I wanted to turn this into an assignment to maintain enjoyment and engagement. An online resources page was set up on BlackBoard to help students with ideas of where to look for reading to help them answer the tasks and find literature to support their arguments (e.g., great literature in the form of charity and Government reports). The ten tasks involved the students having to engage with the task in different ways as I wanted the assignment to help them gain the independent thought processes that are needed at M-level. Several of the tasks are worded in such a way that the students need to use ‘problem-solving’ skills which are in line with the social constructivism approach to teach that I hold. Likewise, the assignment is for two separate courses with students who have a mixture of physical and mental health interests which I wanted them to start developing in the frame of the societal factors being addressed in the unit.
For example:
Week one - students had to pick two areas in England one which they viewed as ‘more affluent’ and one as ‘more deprived’. The students had to then go online and get the health profiles of these two areas and answer a number of questions about them (including their preconceived ideas about affluence and deprivation).
Week three – students were asked to record a podcast giving their definition of culture along with an example of mental or physical health.
Week eight – students had to pick a recent media story that interested them and critically reflect on the health impact that story could have on those reading it.
On reflection of this assignment, maybe I am being more open in my assignments than I first thought. I did not make these changes to the assignment due to the changes in policy or due to a conscious effort to increase the role of student’s digital culture in my assignment but instead the assignment evolved from student feedback and my reflections on the unit. Maybe this is happening more in our teaching and learning practice than we think but we rarely get the chance to reflect on it in this manner. However, I think there is a lot of room for improvement and before I rush to turn all of my other assignments into ‘open assignments’ and persuade all other academics to do the same, there are a few things I need to consider:
- All work would need to be submitted via TurnItIn or another plagiarism-checker so that I could be sure that student’s work is their own. I am not able to do this with the podcast stated above so do I need to ask for a script to be submitted too?
- Clear instructions must be given so to ensure that students do not spend too long searching for information and get side-tracked from the task at hand. Formative feedback maybe vital here. In the assignment example I stated above, I had to set a word count for weekly entries part-way through last year as when students submitted a weekly entry for formative feedback I had weekly entries of over 2000 words!
- The assignment must be fair for all students. Students are a diverse population and I cannot assume that they all are immersed in the digital world in the same way so I must ensure that people are not disadvantaged. It is for this reason that I do not make Twitter an essential part of my teaching and learning environment. In week one, I tell students a few Twitter names of people they may want to follow and tell them that I tweet information that is relevant to this course (@DebbieMSmith1). However, I explain that I do not exclusively put things on Twitter and if it is relevant to their course, I will add to the resources page on Black Board.
- Marking loads, the portfolio I mentioned above was wonderful to mark as the student’s interests really came through in terms of the topics they selected in the 10 tasks but they took me an extremely long time to mark as they were all so varied in terms of topic. This was well received by the students who valued having this flexibility to develop their interests and reported enjoying the experience as they fully engaged with the topics they selected. Therefore, the impact of marking on staff needs to be factored into the equation in terms of increasing student engagement and experience. I have been looking at ways to retain the flexibility for students but reduce the working load for staff by removing a couple of the current tasks and spreading the remaining tasks over the ten weeks (e.g., the week one task stated above had five questions to answer, these will be split over weeks one and two).
- How can feedback be more open?!! I have focused in this blog on assignments and have not really touched upon feedback, which are hand-in-hand in terms of the student and staff experience. After every assignment, I send a summary email via Black Board to the student cohort which collectively tells them they did well and then highlights some things they did well and things they can improve on. I do the same at the end of the unit in response to their unit evaluation as this tends to include comments about the assignment. This is openness in terms of giving individual- and group-level feedback but is this enough?!
Concluding thoughts
I have really enjoyed considering openness in my teaching and learning practice as part of this PGCert unit. I previously restricted thoughts of openness in academic practice to research activities and it is so much more than this. Any ideas or comments on the above would be gratefully received as this has really got me thinking about how I can make sure that I integrate the changing teaching and learning environment of our students into my assignments (and feedback).
