Listening to this while reading this post will have no therapeutic value
This was the second Learning and Teaching Academy workshop I attended this semester, to give it it’s subtitle: Engaging Students to Learning Through Teaching and Assessment. (The big boss, who put the programme together, has a penchant for naming events with a musical theme.)
The workshop was given by Prof. Terry Young, Emeritus Professor of Healthcare Systems at Brunel University, who talked about his experience in academia over the past 15 or so years, having come from industry where he spent a similar length of time, giving him an interesting take on the academic world and conventional practice. On assessment, he asked us to consider what are the actual tangible benefits of, for example, spending time on decided on whether or not a given piece of work is worth 82% or 85%, and could this be time better spent elsewhere? Terry argues that there is little value in time spent this way, instead advocating for threshold based marking, first deciding whether a piece of work is a pass or a fail, and then asking either if it’s a fail, is it a good fail and can the student therefore be guided to a pass in future assignments, or if it’s a pass, is it just a pass or a good pass?
Terry also reflected on the nature of work academics are going to need to do over the next 20-30 years in the face of changes driven by automation and artificial intelligence. He concluded that there are three key tasks which will continue to be necessary: writing and specifying the requirements for programmes and assessments, curating and filtering content, and working closely with students to ensure their development and wellbeing.
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