Abstract:

As we trot along in the first half of the 21st century, educators are confronted with a rapidly evolving landscape, propelled by the emergence of AI knowledge bots and advanced learning and writing programs. The world is changing fast, and traditional assessment methods are facing a challenge from students who are empowered to develop more detailed and structured knowledge. An AI revolution is happening significantly impacting how we evaluate college students. It is perhaps the right time to try more diverse assessment tools in our teaching and evaluation practices. There is a dire need for diverse methods and assessment tools to evaluate the knowledge acquired by each student in the higher education university system. We are in that light happy to present the recent adoption and development of digital diaries at Bifröst University in Iceland.

Using diaries as a tool for students to reflect on their learning is not a novel concept in educational settings. It is a tried-and-tested method for individual assessment. The classic way is to ask students to write diaries that are now done in computerized word-type programmes. In the last century most diaries were written on paper until the dawn of the computer age. Diaries are one of the old tools to test again to fend off the popular AI writing programmes. It has attributes that could help grade individual students without the assistance of AI, thereby instilling a sense of confidence and rigour in its effectiveness.

The authors have utilised diaries in their teaching through the years in different settings. They had both positive and negative prior experiences. The positive aspects included valuable insights into students’ learning experiences, how they managed to reflect on their previous experiences through the theoretical lenses of the course material, and in what way they plan to implement their newly gained knowledge, skills and potential competencies in the future. It is well known that female professors are more likely to be harshly judged by their students than their male counterparts, and this might be a discouraging factor in using diaries as an evaluation tool, particularly if students are encouraged to express their views and concerns in the diaries. In the last two years the authors have experimented with short 5-7 minutes long video-based diaries where the student is in live picture the whole time. We use a gallery of possible topics for the student to choose from so has some traces of the traditional oral exams. But this time it is a one-way street where the professors cannot give instant feedback, but this type of diary has proven to be very valuable and is harder to be compromised by AI help than written diaries that we have now almost totally abandoned.

However, expanding the possibilities could be interesting, trying these methods in different disciplines and study programs, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The findings suggest that digital diaries could lead to more diverse assessment methods. The next step could be to do further comparison between typical oral exams and digital diaries using focus groups or semi structured interviews for in-depth data collection and reflection from students on these methods. The development in higher education is an endless journey. The AI revolution has triggered a more rapid innovation and reflection on all methods.

Keywords:

Diaries, digital, assessment, AI.