Abstract:

Students need repeated practice, structured support and high quality, constructive and timely feedback to acquire complex skills. However, teachers in Higher (Distance) Education supervise increased numbers of students, which makes it challenging for them to regularly provide personal feedback and supervise students’ practice sessions.

The Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method is an (inter)active, practice-oriented online method for practicing skills, giving and receiving peer feedback via video-enhanced rubrics and goal-oriented reflection on one's own performance. This online method, developed with teachers and students through design-based research, provides structured process support that allows students to practice their skills repetitively, both individually and collaboratively.

The Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method uses video-enriched rubrics providing role models and examples and technology-enhanced support for self-regulation, self-/peer-/expert assessment and reflection. These affordances intend to help students with forming a mental model of the skill performance level that is expected, to self-assess and regulate their practice and performance, and to provide structured peer feedback. Students are guided through a complete formative assessment cycle, but determine themselves where they are going, how they are doing, and where to go next. The online Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method aims to ensure that students receive high quality feedback more frequently, so that they can work goal-oriented and structured on their skill development, without increasing teachers’ work load. Furthermore, students can practice at home, in their own time and as often as they want to address the issues they face while striving for skill mastery. Both students and teachers can keep track of the development of students’ skills mastery and their progress within the method through a dashboard with visualizations. We expect that students, when using this method, become more skilled and that they are satisfied with the received feedback. Furthermore, we expect that the P(e)erfectly Skilled method offers several opportunities to organize skills education more efficiently (reduction of teachers’ time) and effectively online, for large groups of students in Higher (Distance) Education, and that both students and teachers enjoy working with the method.

To evaluate these expectations, we applied the Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method in the domains of Law and Psychology at two universities, to train students’ pleading and academic presentation skills. In this paper we describe the background and ratio, design-based research set-up and technology-enhanced online process support provided by the Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method. Preliminary findings, based on interviews with teachers and students, on the question whether the Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method (positively) supports skills training in Higher (Distance) education are shared. Moreover, further and future potential of this approach to (online technology-enhanced) skills training with respect to efficiency, effectiveness, and attractiveness in Higher (Distance) Education is discussed.

Keywords:

Skills training, complex skills, formative assessment, (peer)feedback, reflection, self-regulated learning, video-enhanced rubrics, technology-enhanced learning.