Abstract:
This paper examines an online learning and assessment platform designed to facilitate outcome-based assessment and student agency by using grade-aligned tasks, delayed summative assessment, individualised formative feedback dialogues, and student choice of target grade. The platform facilitates a learning design approach where task design and formative feedback guide and scaffold students’ learning pathways towards their target grades. In the paper, we describe and discuss the learning-focused and learner-centred features of the platform’s design and implementation, illustrating how the approach allows students and teachers to focus on learning processes and outcomes rather than on the final products of assessment tasks.
The paper illustrates how the platform functionality and use of grade-aligned personas and tasks enables learning design to respond to students’ diverse circumstances and aspirations, including changes to in circumstances and aspirations over the study period. We discuss the suitability of the learning design for engaging contemporary university cohorts, who have diverse backgrounds, aspirations, capabilities, and capacity to commit time for study. Connecting back to the previous paper, an important feature of the platform design and implementation is that the grade levels have qualitatively different foci, communicated to students through student personas that describe different orientations towards learning in the course.
We argue that the platform design and its associated teaching and learning paradigm demonstrate an innovative and effective response to the increasing complexity in higher education by improving opportunities for students to enact their agency and potentially supporting learner agency for all students.
The paper illustrates how the platform functionality and use of grade-aligned personas and tasks enables learning design to respond to students’ diverse circumstances and aspirations, including changes to in circumstances and aspirations over the study period. We discuss the suitability of the learning design for engaging contemporary university cohorts, who have diverse backgrounds, aspirations, capabilities, and capacity to commit time for study. Connecting back to the previous paper, an important feature of the platform design and implementation is that the grade levels have qualitatively different foci, communicated to students through student personas that describe different orientations towards learning in the course.
We argue that the platform design and its associated teaching and learning paradigm demonstrate an innovative and effective response to the increasing complexity in higher education by improving opportunities for students to enact their agency and potentially supporting learner agency for all students.