seminar
Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age: Alternative Assessment and Course Redesign at a Norwegian University
Description:
Visitor under the "Seed Fund for Development of International and Cross-border Collaborative Research Grant Proposals (“ICB Fund”)"
Research has demonstrated that the design of quality courses requires the constructive alignment of content, instructional methods, and assessment activities with intended learning outcomes, as well as constructive feedback on student performance throughout the learning process. In Norwegian higher education, however, there is a long-standing distinction between teaching (undervisning) and assessment (vurdering). The typical university classroom is a place for information delivery and the examination is a place for information retrieval. In an effort to address this issue and improve student learning outcomes, the University of Bergen is implementing a new initiative to help instructors redesign their courses to make use of alternative assessment methods a central feature of their courses. This seminar presents an ongoing project set out to systematically redesign the assessment activities in over twenty courses. The speaker will illustrate how strategies will be chosen to match the course’s content and learning outcomes, and will be developed collaboratively with other participants. Furthermore, he will introduce how the effectiveness of these methods will be rigorously measured and compared using a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures.
Robert Gray is Associate Professor of University Pedagogy in the Institute for Pedagogy at the University of Bergen, Norway. He holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from the University of Alabama. He has over fifteen years of experience in university pedagogy, particularly in regard to online learning and other uses of technology in the teaching and learning process. His research interests include digital assessment practices in higher education and interaction in online learning.