Design and implementation choices > Lecturer guidance

Question 32
What advice and guidance (both practical and pedagogical) is available to lecturers about using e-assessment in their courses, and to what extent do they engage with it?

What motivates this question?

The question is motivated by several dual-degree programmes delivered at the Jinan University – University of Birmingham Joint Institute (J-BJI), in which the majority of core mathematics modules, had all of their in-term summative assessments, delivered as e-assessments, using Möbius. At the outset, none of the module leads delivering lectures were overly familiar with e-assessment or Möbius, albeit staff with practical and pedagogical experience existed elsewhere within the university. Module leads were primarily responsible for the creation of e-assessment content to be used within their modules.

The question is thus motivated by observations of how staff engaged in authoring of questions, and what seems to influence, or perhaps limit/expand the scope, of their e-assessment content.

For context, in 2017, the academic team started with no e-assessment content. During the previous 2 years, we have delivered (roughly) 3 e-assessments, every 2 weeks, for 32 weeks of the year, to roughly 600 students in 3 year-groups. These e-assessments cover a variety of courses in real analysis, calculus, algebra, combinatorics, probability & statistics, optimization, and mathematical finance.

What might an answer look like?

Quantitative analysis of the content produced by the aforementioned academic staff would provide some scope to answering this question. Interviews, surveys and other traditional research methods would also be helpful to obtain qualitative information. John Meyer and several colleagues at the University of Birmingham are preparing an article aiming to respond to this question in the context of e-assessments delivered at the J-BJI.

Two key features to answering this question rely on: observing content developed by sufficiently many staff who are new to developing e-assessment content; and, for such staff to have developed content over a sufficiently large period of time (to allow their understanding of e-assessments to develop).

The direct connections between this RQ and the other RQs are not obvious, although the findings from other research questions should be expected to inform any future guidance that becomes available for lecturers who are new to e-assessment.

References

Watch this space; work by

  • JCMUoB and colleagues is in the pipeline.