Abstract:
Many courses involve group activities to let students to collaborate and work together to solve problems. However, it is not easy to ensure all students are actively contributed and collaborate with each other. Besides, teachers usually collect the final outcome and mark it as a whole, it is difficult to assess the group project fairly within a group if the workload is unevenly distributed. In this project, we proposed “An Online Evidence-based Assessment System” for students to carry out group activities such as discussion, writing report, sharing resources, etc. The system can keep track of individuals’ progress and compare with the other group members. Students can check their current progress, such as the number of posts, replies and completed tasks, to promote active engagement and collaborative learning. Whereas teachers can get the activity log of all students in the class, which could be used to set assessment criteria and identify free-riders. To study the effect of this online evidence-based assessment approach in higher education, nine courses were using this platform for conducting group activities in 2018-19. The results showed that this interactive system can benefit both teachers and students on learning, teaching and assessment.
Code:
T0210
Principal Project Supervisors:
Keywords provided by authors:
- Evidence-based assessment
- Active engagement
- Collaborative Learning
- Cooperative learning
- Data mining modeling
Start Date:
01 Jul 2018
End Date:
30 Jun 2019
Status:
Completed
Result:
An Online Evidence-based Assessment System called "GMoodle" (https://gmoodle.eduhk.hk) was launched in September 2018. It provides all the basic functions (e.g. forum, assignment, group choice, feedback, file, URL, etc.) of Moodle plus some additional customized features including chatroom, Wiki and daily progress report for individual and group to facilitate collaborative and cooperative learning.
This TDG project includes two phases of testing (i.e. Semester 1 and 2 in 2018/19). There were 292 students participated. The activity logs of each participant were recorded in the system. Students can check their learning progress within a group by accessing the daily report in GMoodle, and gain virtual marks by participating more online group activities. Whereas, the role of teacher can access more data such as real-time ranking for individual students, weekly ranking of groups and the best group with the highest number of posts or replies.
Impact:
The impact of GMoodle is promising, which can be referenced to the pre/ post-test survey, focus group interview, SET result and teacher's feedback. GMoodle can help the students to improve their group communication, peer understanding and identification of common learning goal, however, the trust and supportive relationships were lower. In the focus group interview, students reflected that GMoodle can encourage them to participate more in group learning activities. Some of them think that the daily participation rate was useful for them to review their learning goals, and they were motivated when seeing some students with higher participation score. Furthermore, the course grade is evaluated to see the relationship between group activeness and the academic performance of students. The results show that active group participation can help students to have better achievement. In the post-test survey, around 80% of students considered this learning experience in GMoodle would help them in the future teaching career. This is not only a new way to encourage collaborative and cooperative learning among students, but also help teachers to have a better class management with less effort.
Deliverables:
Seminars/Presentations/Sharing Sessions
Lam, W. M. W. (2019, August 24). GMoodle: Online Evidence-based Assessment System for Student Group Activities. Oral presentation by the Knowledge Transfer Office of The Education University of Hong Kong at the International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada (iCAN). (with Silva medal & special inventor award) . (Number of participants: around 377 conference participants) (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/gmoodle-online-evidence-base...)
Lam, W. M. W. (2019, October 22). GMoodle: Online Evidence-based Assessment System for Student Group Activities. Seminar presented at the Departmental meeting conducted at The Education University of Hong Kong. (Number of participants: 28 staff) (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/gmoodle-online-evidence-base...)
Books/ Book Chapters/ Journal Articles/ Conference Papers
Lam, W. M. W., Liu, Y. W. D. & Lo, K. H. (2019). An Online Evidence-based Assessment System to Promote Collaborative and Cooperative Learning in Tertiary Education. Paper presented at the International Conference on Education and Learning (ICEL), Osaka, Japan. (Number of participants: around 100 conference participants) (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/an-online-evidence-based-ass...)
Lam, W. M. W., Xie, H., Liu, Y. W. D. & Yung, W. H. K. (2019). Investigating Online Collaborative Learning on Students' Learning Outcomes in Higher Education 2019. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Education and E-Learning (ICEEL), pp. 13-19. (https://doi.org/10.1145/3371647.3371656) (Number of participants: around 100 conference participants) (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/investigating-the-effect-of-...)
Lam, W. M. W. (2019, May 24). A Study of Online Evidence-based Assessment System to Promote Collaborative and Cooperative Learning in Group Activities. Paper presented at the Learning and Teaching @ EdUHK Festival 2019, The Education University of Hong Kong. (Number of participants: 60 conference participants) (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/a-study-of-online-evidence-b...)
Teaching and Learning Resources/ Materials (including online resources)
Online Evidence-based Assessment System – GMoodle (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/online-evidence-based-assess...)
Financial Year:
2018-19
Type:
TDG