Fellows

Professor Geoffrey Crisp

2009 ALTC National Teaching Fellow
The University of Adelaide, South Australia

Professor Geoffrey Crisp is Director of the Centre for Learning and Professional Development at The University of Adelaide. Professor Crisp’s areas of expertise are: enhancing academic practice; computer-aided learning and assessment; education and computers; and multimedia in teaching.

Professor Crisp’s Associate Fellowship was completed in late 2008: see below for summary of program.

Fellowship completed: Late 2010

geoffrey [dot] crisp [at] adelaide [dot] edu [dot] au

Rethinking assessment in the participatory digital world – assessment 2.0

This fellowship will develop strategies to assist teachers and higher education institutions to align their learning, teaching and assessment practices in a rapidly changing digital context. The assessment of student activities in collaborative and interactive digital learning environments and how to appropriately design assessment activities in a participatory web environment are major challenges facing universities.

Students are using learning environments that include social networking, syndicated media-sharing services, collaborative editing, virtual worlds and digital portfolios; how are we going to provide valid and reliable assessments that align with skills developed in these new learning environments? The emphasis for this fellowship will be on the appropriate, effective and productive assessment of activities in participatory Web 2.0 environments. Building local communities of practice around these issues is an important goal of the fellowship activities.

Associate Fellowship program
Raising the profile of diagnostic, formative and summative e-assessments

This fellowship promoted learning and teaching in Australian higher education by enhancing approaches to e-assessment through the articulation of an e-assessment design model and the collection of disciplinary examples of interactive e-assessments.

The use of technology does not, by itself, lead to improvements in student learning outcomes. In order to achieve demonstrable improvements in learning outcomes a design process is needed that connects the three complementary assessment activities – diagnostic, formative and summative – with learning and feedback. A simple model for diagnostic, formative and summative assessment tasks linked with learning activities was developed and used throughout this fellowship. An integrated learning-assessment model facilitates appropriate feedback to students because of the inherent links between learning and assessment.

The widespread use of multiple-choice questions has led to a preponderance of selected response question types in e-assessments. Teachers would like to use questions that require more constructed responses, so that relational and extended abstract responses can be assessed. The fellowship program included preparation of e-assessment questions that are more interactive and require students to use additional resources to construct their responses, without necessarily involving complex scenarios or sentence constructions. The fellowship promoted the use of java applets, QuickTime VR and interactive spreadsheets as tools that discipline academics can use in their own e-assessments with minimal training. The fellowship noted that using mobile phones for students to provide feedback (for example via the Votapedia system developed by CSIRO) is both more convenient and less time-consuming than the more traditional personal response system (clickers).

The discipline examples of interactive e-assessments can be found on the website created as part of the National Teaching Fellowship activities, http://www.transformingassessment.com.

A number of presentations and workshops were conducted as part of the fellowship activities. These include meetings with international experts in learning, teaching and assessment; presentations and workshops conducted at Australian, New Zealand and UK universities; as well as conference presentations. Many of the presentations promoted local activities directed towards improving assessment practices.
 

ASCED Field of Education: 0701 - Teacher Education

Fellowship Discipline: Academic staff, E-assessment, Higher education, Learning and Professional Development

The information on this fellow's page was correct as of 10 May, 2010.