Abstract:

This paper is a qualitative narrative analysis of a journey through a twelve-week, 36-hour graduate level online education class at a Canadian post-secondary university, wherein the professor and twenty-one masters level students, (who were practicing professional teachers and educational leaders in higher education), used principles of authentic assessment and universal design for learning (UDL) to co-design the course. The course was held in a web-based synchronous video format, allowing for face to face interaction through webcams. Elements of this collaborative framework included co-design of learning outcomes, diverse choices in assignments and their weighted values to grades, individual selection of professionally relevant readings from literature both within and outside the course, and options to combine individual or group projects. Through a collaborative community design, students were actively integrated to the assessment process, empowered to take responsibility for their learning, and challenged to bring creativity and innovation to both the products and the process of their learning journeys.
The foundational framework for this course was based on key principles of UDL including representation, action/expression and engagement. These formed the boundaries of the “learning sandbox” for this course experience, specifically the multiple means of representation of course concepts, multiple means of action and expression of learning, and diverse student voice and choice regarding engagement in all elements of the course. Over the course of the twelve weeks, graduate students used online settings to discuss in breakout groups of 5-6 students the key concepts of assessment and evaluation. Questions explored and discussed included the purpose of assessment and evaluation, the discomfort of taking responsibility for their own assessment, challenges of ungrading, and deconstruction of previously held notions of the power of the teacher in assessing and evaluating students. This paper summarizes the student reflections gleaned from course recordings in a web-based video format, student and professor field notes, reflective practices during the course, and student comments about their expectations prior to the course, as well as their personal professional practices as educators and assessors. In addition, it challenges traditional notions of assessment and evaluation in higher education, queries the purpose of grades as a merit-based sorter of students, and allows students to express their learning in ways that honour their lived experiences, cultural backgrounds and professional knowledge. In sum, the products created in this process were found to be far superior to those in classes where teachers determined the structures, and this suggests new directions for the co-design of effective online classes for graduate students.

Keywords:

Authentic Assessment, Universal Design Learning, Online, Graduate, Ungrading.