Rate your mate for food for thought: Elsewhere use a grader

Abstract

<p>Finnish university pedagogues are keen on applying flipped learning techniques to improve education and learning outcomes. Flipped learning implies the transfer of assessment in a more formative direction and targeted feedback that is frequently delivered. On the contrary, teaching resources are decreasing. Increasing the portion of self-, peer- and automatic assessment partially helps solving this dilemma. Currently, Tampere University is in the midst of the process of combining two separate campuses together. Both campuses offer major-specific computer science studies. This paper presents a case study of merging basic level web technology courses, and in particular their different assessment practices together. The courses are targeted for the second- and third-year students, and the number of participants is about 200 in the studied course (enrolled N=324 / completed N=178). The merged course was run in two learning management systems (LMSs), called Plussa and WETO. The switch from one LMS to another happened in the middle of the course. LMSs employed different assessment practices for weekly exercises: Plussa assessed them automatically, whereas WETO exploited peer-reviews. This provided a unique opportunity to compare these two assessment methods and the study addresses the pedagogical opportunities and challenges of both.</p>