Authors:
Pia Niemelä
and
Mikko Nurminen
Affiliation:
Tampere Universities, PO Box 527, FI-33101, Tampere, Finland
Keyword(s):
Tools to Assess Learning, Instructional Design, Mentoring and Tutoring, Metrics and Performance Measurement, Project based Learning, Engineering Education, Flipped Classroom.
Abstract:
Finnish university pedagogues are keen on applying flipped learning techniques to improve education and learning outcomes. Flipped learning implies the transfer of assessment in a more formative direction and targeted feedback that is frequently delivered. On the contrary, teaching resources are decreasing. Increasing the portion of self-, peer- and automatic assessment partially helps solving this dilemma. Currently, Tampere University is in the midst of the process of combining two separate campuses together. Both campuses offer major-specific computer science studies. This paper presents a case study of merging basic level web technology courses, and in particular their different assessment practices together. The courses are targeted for the second- and third-year students, and the number of participants is about 200 in the studied course (enrolled N=324 / completed N=178). The merged course was run in two learning management systems (LMSs), called Plussa and WETO. The switch fro
m one LMS to another happened in the middle of the course. LMSs employed different assessment practices for weekly exercises: Plussa assessed them automatically, whereas WETO exploited peer-reviews. This provided a unique opportunity to compare these two assessment methods and the study addresses the pedagogical opportunities and challenges of both.
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