As we approach the new academic year, have you considered incorporating Renewable Assessment into your Course Designs?

In this post, I like to give you a quick background to the OER and the OEP, and then I like to blog about how and why renewable assessment could be incorporated into course designs.

While I was partially away for Summer, ‘Opening Up Education’ have been the third part of my Technology-Enhanced Learning course at the Open University between June and August. It consisted of a thorough and robust 9 weeks of learning, supported with web links to excellent resources and lots of opportunities for collaborative work — and a final assignment (scored %79). Through this part of the course, I developed a thorough understanding of what is Open, what is meant by Open Educational Resources, and what Open Educational Practices may entail. I also grew a scholarly interest in the idea of open and renewable assessment.

Open Educational Resources

‘Open’ does not only cover the educational resources that are freely accessible; David Wiley (2015) put forward a ‘5R’ model that highlights the five ways in which the users can engage with the resources, including Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute (Wiley,online). Open Educational Resources are usually accessible, open licenced text, media and another digital asset, which can be used for teaching, learning, assessing and researching.

Open Educational Practices

OEP is connected to the use and practice of OER in almost every stage of learning, teaching, and researching, and even scholarship, ranging from open literature and open pedagogies to renewable/open assessment and open ed-tech tools. Renewable assessment is a form of open pedagogy supported with the OER, including open textbooks, free educational tools, collaborative learning and student-led and open teaching.

Lets describe disposable assessment

Until I studied the H880, I never thought if my students’ assignments were wasted after being marked or whether the time which my students had invested in writing up essays could have been utilised for better learning outcomes. Alternatively, as a student, I never asked if my efforts of reading or writing up a piece contributed to the well-being of the wider community.

Leigh-Anne Perryman, the sole author of part three of the H880, and Hendrick (2015 online) and Wiley (2016, online) have been phenomenal for me. After reading their course content and blogs, I began to see assessment from totally a different perspective and decided to raise an awareness in the Higher Education about renewable assessments and promote making learners’ assignments or essays renewable, that is motivated to make the world a better place and students feeling their efforts and hours of work are valued, not wasted.

Wiley (2016) described the disposable assessment as “{A}n assessment can be characterised as “disposable” if everyone understands that its ultimate destiny is the garbage can”. I am not convinced that both learners and educators understand or have any form of awareness that the ultimate destiny of the assessments are the garbage can. I think that this is a given situation, and we are all born into it, therefore except for the few of us, the great majority of the educators have not thought about how assessments are disposable and whether innovative methods of assessment, such as the renewables assessment could be more beneficial to students’ learning experiences.

Furthermore, Wiley promoted the idea of “renewable assessment”, which “differs in that the student’s work will not be discarded at the end of the process, but will instead add value to the world in some way” (online); as I read these lines from Wiley, lots of ideas prompted in my head about how assessments could be designed to add a value to the world and beyond.

Examples of Renewable Assessment

Borrowing Hendrick and Wiley’s list, below are excellent examples of renewables assessments:

· Blog

· Editing or Writing up Wikipedia article

· Creating tutorials or “learning objects” for their fellow students and the public

· Creating study questions or suggestions of “what to focus on” for the readings

· Creating lists of “common problem” or advice for writing, after doing peer review of each others’ work and self-reflecting on their own

· Creating possible exam questions

Let’s talk about Editing or Writing up Wikipedia article in more detail

Instead of asking students to write up essays to submit to their instructor and then throw away these articles at the end. Students could be asked to (1) edit an existing Wikipedia article or/and (2) start writing up an article on Wikipedia from scratch. There are two examples where this approach has been successfully put into the practice.

Wiley pointed to how a Latin American Literature in Translation course at the University of British Columbia contributed to Wikipedia in 2008. The collective goal was to bring selection of article on Latin American literature to feature article status. By the end of the project, they had contributed three featured articles and eight good articles. None of these articles was a good article at the outset, two did not even exist.

One other example come from Hendrick who also asked her students to cretae Wikipedia-style articles on philosophers or texts, using University of British Columbia- Wiki first. Then other students (in future classes) could edit those, and then maybe eventually we could move to doing something on Wikipedia itself (the content would be good, and maybe students would be motivated to move some of it over to Wikipedia at that point).

Challenges and Benefits of Renewable Assessment

Of course replacing essays or assignments with editing or writing up an article on wikipedia is not straight forward as it sounds. Hendrick said: “ This is a big task; it requires that students learn how to do so (not just technologically, but in terms of the rules and practices of Wikipedia), plus determining which articles need editing, etc.” (online). This means extra work for both students and educators, however it also means everyone can gain more practical skills for the Digital Age and Education 4.0.

What makes renewable assessment appealing is the emotion that “Everyone wants their work to matter” (Wiley, online). Of course, Wiley does not support his argument with evidence, but I agree that motivating contex is vital in promoting renewable assessment.

For instance by contributing to a Wikipedia article, students would know their work or contributions would be there as long as they prefer it. Plus, their collective or individual papers may facilitate the advancement of a particular subject area which would support another researcher’s learning or knowledge building. By this, students may become knowledge producers, not just receivers.

Now, will you consider adopting a form of renewable assessment in your course this term?