Abstract:

This paper introduces an innovative bespoke Android App used for in-class assessment in order to help lecturers to provide marks and feedback easily and efficiently. This work was inspired by Personal Development Programme (PDP), a module designed for the Joint Programme (JP) students between Queen Mary, University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications [1]. The PDP is a compulsory module in the first three years of JP and includes a mix of skills and activities that employers would consider as valuable; like presentation and public speaking, team working, and technical writing skills.

A typical PDP assessment involves a group presentation; particularly, in a semester there are up to 1200 students working on PDP tasks that involve in-class assessment of up to 240 group presentations. This large amount of assessments in a short time generates a problem, namely how a lecturer could efficiently mark the presentations and provide timely feedback to the students. Traditionally a lecturer assesses the in-class presentations by taking notes (either on paper or digitally), followed by giving an overall oral feedback to the whole class at the end of the assessment. In addition, after the assessment sessions, the lecturer has to transfer the written comments and mark for each presentation on a pre-defined marking sheet for each individual group, and share with students via a virtual learning environment (VLE) system. Over the last few years different methods have been trailed, such as involving more members of academic staff in the assessment. However this has not effectively solved the problem of marking and providing individual feedback as one lecturer still has to mark and give feedback to at least 10 different groups of students, and this method inevitably run the risk of increased marking discrepancy done by different people.

An innovative solution inspired by the increased adoption of Mobile apps in teaching and learning was proposed to solve this problem. An Android App called MarkUp was developed so that lecturers can take notes, give comments and mark the performances during the in-class assessment. The app has the function of importing different marking criteria for different assessment. Before the assessment, students and groups information can be imported into the app. During the assessment, the lecturer can select a certain group, type comments, enter marks for each criteria, and save all. After assessment of all group work, lecturer can use the app to export the marks and feedback comments to a spreadsheet, and share them with students via email. With the aid of the app, all comments and marks are collected and saved in one go. This greatly reduces time consumption from duplicating paperwork on the lecturer side, and reduces delays of receiving feedback on the student side.

The MarkUP app has been tested in PDP in-class assessment and improvement areas have been identified. Future work aims to fix application bugs and streamline information import and export between the app and the existing VLE system.

References:
[1] L. Cuthbert, N. Yao, B. Chib, Y. Ying and Y. Wang, “A Success Story in Inter-Disciplinary, Inter-Continental Engineering Education” in Proceedings of IEEE conference of Transforming Engineering Education: Creating Interdisciplinary Skills for Complex Global Environments, Dublin, Ireland, April 2010.

Keywords:

Assessment, mobile app, Android app, feedback.