Rubrics, Assessment and eProctoring in Education

Wiki edited by Laura Gibbs.

In my experience, people usually don't consciously decide to plagiarize, but they may end up plagiarizing "by accident" because they run out of time, or they get confused about the assignment, or maybe they copy-and-paste, intending to go back and edit later but forgetting to do so. Every time that I have seen plagiarism in an assignment, the person swore that the plagiarism happened "by accident." That does not change the fact of the matter: plagiarism, even when it happens by accident, is still plagiarism, and the consequences are serious. It's like when you are caught speeding or running a red light: it doesn't matter if you did not know you were speeding or if you did not notice the red light - you are still going to get a ticket.

While technology brought disruptive change in many industries, education is only now hovering at the brink of deep and fundamental changes. Open Education and online education challenge the traditional bricks and mortar institution and several forces are driving disaggregation and democratization of the entire educational value chain. A learner now can take a course taught by Yale professors from the comfort of his living room in a remote part of the world. While much has changed, one significant problem of education, assessment needs to be reinvented.

Delaware is one of a handful of states that has moved all of its testing online....

KF:  If this continues across the K-12 sector and across the globe it presents interesting challenges for Higher and Further Education.  Australian universities are already looking at eMarking and eProctoring strategies.

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value. Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours.

Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

Society does not in general reward contributions to the public good. Indeed, quite the opposite - in order to earn profit, corporations and individuals bribe governments to act against the public interest. Companies are more interested in seeing services privatized, instituting user fees, or other measures designed to wring wealth out of what might otherwise be a universal program. As for long range public good, such as environmental protection, or society-wide public good, such as energy and information access, more money is to be made ignoring the public good than supporting it.

Tegrity’s Remote Proctoring feature ensures the integrity of exams taken off campus, without the need to send the student to an expensive, and often distant proctoring facility. Rather, using a webcam and microphone the student can take their exam at their home while Tegrity records video of the student taking the test, along with the associated screen activity. The recordings cannot be paused while the student takes the exam, and when completed, the recording is immediately uploaded for instructors to review at up to 8x speed.

Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. Each keystroke, comprehension quiz, peer-to-peer forum discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed and, most importantly, absorbed.

KF:  From around the 10 minute mark in the video Daphne discusses assessment and feedback strategies.  There is also some interesting discussion around the efficacy and validity of Self and Peer assessment strategies - an area that many educational sectors could review more seriously. (see Sadler and Good 2006 - http://tinyurl.com/EdAssess )