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Manifesto for teaching online

Over the course of the 2009/10 academic year, we employed 8 research associates to keep a set of detailed field notes as they participated in an MSc course as students. The research associates (RAs) also developed and managed an ‘assessment and feedback stories’ wiki, to which students at all stages of the programme were invited to contribute their experiences of assessment and feedback on the MSc in E-learning.

All students intending to take the courses we wished to examine were invited to apply for the RA posts. RAs were selected on the basis of their applications and subsequent interviews for the posts. Each RA worked on the project for one semester, and each was responsible for keeping field notes from one 20-credit course on the MSc programme, working a maximum of 32 hours in total.

Ethnographies of studying online

The courses specified for the ethnographic accounts were chosen for the range of assessment, feedback and writing strategies they employed. The Introduction to Digital Environments course was represented in both semesters, and by a total of four RAs, because it is the foundation course of the MSc, and because it is weighted the most heavily of all the taught courses (40 credits). It therefore plays an especially important role in establishing the culture of the programme. Each RA had a personal blog space, which was accessible to the RA and to the principal investigator (PI) for the project, Jen Ross. Once completed, each blog was archived and made available to the rest of the project team for analysis. Throughout the semester, each RA wrote observations and analysis of their experiences on their course, following the virtual ethnographic principle of participant observation. The PI commented on some of these, asking for detail or clarification and offering support and encouragement.

Read more about working with students as researchers.

Assessment and feedback stories wiki

The assessment and feedback stories wiki was designed by the RAs, with input from the project team via a discussion board. Its purpose was to invite students on the programme to share their experiences of assessment and feedback on the MSc. Some basic structure was initially offered in the form of questions about best and worst experiences of feedback and assessment. The possibility of anonymity was considered important, so students were invited to log in to the wiki using a generic account, and to use pseudonyms if they wished to. Roughly half the participants in the wiki interacted anonymously.
In the second semester, the new group of RAs continued to develop the wiki, offering a number of additional questions about how, when and where feedback was received; what was different about online feedback; and what assessments participants found most challenging, effective, and supported. The second group of RAs also felt that offering a space that could be contributed to more simply would be beneficial, so they set up a collaborative “sticky note” page using the web service “Wallwisher”, to allow for videos, images and anonymous text to be shared. A few people contributed to this, but most of the activity was in the wiki.

Eighteen contributions were offered over the course of the academic year, and they varied in length from several lines to several paragraphs. Participation was requested at several points during the year, and contributions clustered around these requests. Contributions ranged over a number of topics, including: the nature of the weblogs in the foundation course; receiving assignment feedback without grades; participation in group work; getting it ‘wrong’ and how this felt; nominating assessment criteria; being both a professional and a student; trying to mirror course design in assessment design; dealing with new ways of demonstrating knowledge; understanding assessment frameworks; needing timely feedback; feed-forward; the need for sufficiently critical formative feedback; and the possibility of objective assessment at postgraduate level.


msc


updated 1 November 2011


contact jen.ross@ed.ac.uk for more information