Abstract:

The Norwegian Police University College (NPUC) has developed an online mentoring education. Approximately 300 students complete this programme each year. For many years, the programme was taught classroom-based, but factors such as high demand made it desirable to convert the programme into a fully online-based programme. This triggered discussions among the academic staff at NPUC regarding how one would manage to retain the practical aspects of the programme despite it now being asynchronous and fully digital. The target group for the programme are police employees who have counselling tasks assigned to their function. The learning outcome descriptions related to skills that the students are to achieve are the following: 'After completing the programme, students will be able to plan and conduct counselling sessions and to reflect on, assess, and justify their choice of communication in counselling'. In the old programme, this had been achieved through practical training followed by feedback and tested using a similar practical exam. With this as a backdrop, NPUC chose to change the practical exam in the programme and make this exam both practical and digital. Students were required to submit a video of a counselling session lasting approximately 30 minutes. In the video they were requested to include an oral self-assessment of their learning outcome after the counselling session. As a result of this new way to teach and carry out examinations within a practical field, we became interested in examining how this would affect the students, their learning outcome, and the programme as a whole. Our questions of interest were the following:
1. Will the use of video as an exam form render a correct picture of a practical exam?
2. Will the use of video as an exam form render a correct picture of the students' level of achievement of the learning outcomes?
3. How will assessment of the digital-practical exam videos work, and will the students achieve the same learning outcome when compared to earlier exam results?
The exciting thing in this context was to look at whether such an examination form is compatible with assessing a practical activity (such as counselling). Here, of course, it is possible to discuss whether this form of exam is realistic and how much the students had edited the video or completed the counselling session several times, or if the entire video was just an act put on by the counsellor and the person acting as learner/focus person. Our measure of quality was that most students passed since the censors thought the students had acquired the intended learning outcome. Another indicator of quality was that an equal amount of students passed the exam, just as when the programme was non-digital. Furthermore, a practical exam is not normally verifiable in its nature after the exam has taken place, but by submitting a video there is no problem with verifiability for other academic staff as it can be viewed over and over. This opens the possibility for students to appeal their grade if they wish to do so. This also means that students' rights are better safeguarded and thus in line with the Norwegian qualification framework. It also raises a question for further research: Does the possibility of viewing a practical performance several times, or even stopping the video to analyse details, change the assessment situation in any way? And does it change it for better or worse?

Keywords:

Mentoring education, practice exam, counselling, online education, digitalization.