Crowd-sourcing and disseminating exemplars of technology-enhanced assessment

The Irish Universities Association Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning (EDTL) project aims to mainstream digital in teaching, learning and assessment through a professional development programme. As part of this project, Dublin City University (DCU) specifically wants to diversify the assessment methods utilised across the university.

Faculty who have utilised traditional assessment methods for some time often have difficulty conceptualising the possibilities that digital technologies can afford. Discussions with DCU educators as part of the EDTL project led the team to realise that technology-enhanced assessment exemplars across a range of disciplines could support educators to re-imagine assessment design. Crowd-sourcing was an obvious strategy for such a resource as it afforded the opportunity to draw on the experience of the community. Crowd-sourcing also aligns with constructivist and connectivist theories of learning which the project team identify with in terms of their practice (Brennan, 2015; Donlon, Costello & Brown, 2020; Mattar, 2018). The open nature of crowd-sourcing dictated that the resource be designed as an open education resource (OER), aligning with open practice which is widespread in the area of learning technology (Koseoglu S. & Bozkurt, A., 2018; Weller, 2015).

For the past year the team has been crowdsourcing examples at events and conferences based in Ireland and the UK. The OER has been disseminated locally within DCU and to other universities and beyond via the national EDTL project structure. It was also used to support the recent pivot to alternative assessments in response to the Covid-19 crisis.

This EdTech presentation will introduce the OER to attendees with the aim of disseminating it even further so that other members of the teaching community can draw inspiration from it. The presenters will reflect on the process of collating the OER and share future plans. Conference attendees will also be invited to contribute to the OER themselves.