Group Assessment

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Assessing group work is a common requirement for many courses and there a number of ways in which technology can help you to monitor their progress, assess the individual contributions of students and the collective work of the group.

Why would I use technology to aid group assessment?

  • View student work during its creation
  • Monitor collaboration throughout the group process
  • Provide formative feedback during the project
  • Access records of student interactions (e.g. messages, edits, reflections) to assess individual contributions to the group work produced
  • Combine with electronic submission to utilise the originality checker
  • Record group presentations to assess later and make available to other markers or external examiners

How do I use technology to do this?

There are a number of different technologies which could be used to support group learning. Which tool you use depends upon what the group work entails and which tools would assist them in achieving the learning outcomes of the assessment.

Groups in Course Resources (Blackboard) – creates areas for the students to collaborate and communicate online with the rest of their group (wikis, blogs, discussion, email and file sharing).

Assignment in Course Resources – You can set up assignments to be set up to take groups submissions but you need to set up the groups using the Groups tool in Course Resources first.

Lecture recording (Panopto) – record the student presentation for you or the student to review and identify key areas for improvement.

Blackboard Collaborate – Like Panopto, this tool can be used to record student presentations for online students but also to help facilitate online meetings for the groups as they collaborate.

Course Resources wiki – This can be used for students to create a collective resource, where student contributions can be seen on an individual level.

Course Resources blog – Each group member can add posts to the blog creating a collective resource.

Course Resources discussions – this tool allows students to collaborate, communicate and debate with each other. Contributions to discussions can be viewed by individual to assess group member’s contributions.

WordPress – By setting up WordPress sites you can enable students to collaborate in building an online resource, blog or website which you or their peers can assess.

Good Practice

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