All entries for Saturday 09 April 2005

April 09, 2005

Response to Derek Morrison's argument about the attraction of non–institutional elearning services

Follow-up to Shock of the Old Conference, 2005 from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In his keynote speech at the Shock of the Old conference at Oxford, Derek Morrison argued that much of the current elearning infrastructure does not support the kinds of high-level social process that HE users require. And as a result, they are turning to services not provided by the institution. In a question at the end of the presentation i responded by saying that at Warwick we have observed this, and that in some areas we are attempting to provide the kinds of services that students want, but with valuable additional functionality that only university can offer. I now add to this the further argument that students do also value good guaranteed support.

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We have observed that students, and to a lesser extent lecturers, are using external services in a self-organized way. However, they are quite smart about the risks in doing so.

I have had discussions with students who are maintaining blogs on both external systems and on our Warwick Blogs system. They understand the dangers of being tied into external services that are run for profit. They also know the limitations of free services, and the lack of guarantees that they offer.

They are, therefore, less likely to use such external services for critical activities. They are used heavily for less formal and less critical (although often important) activities.

On the contrary, now that our IT Service department is being much more serious about stating and maintaining levels of service, whilst offering the kind of services that student want, I suspect that students will start using our provisions more fully. The trick is to get the right provisions, with added functionality beyond external offerings, and furthermore, to support interoperability with the informal learning that students are carrying out on non-university systems (the filling-station model is an example of where we must get this interoperability right).


Robert O'Toole : 09 Apr 2005 22:59 |  Tags:   |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Qualrus – automated essay marking

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4425423.stm

Responding to student demand, the University of Missouri have introduced an automated essay marking tool. Claims concerning its abilities can be believed. However, does that necessarily mean that it is a good thing?

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The Qualrus system is capable of pattern searching and semantic analysis of an essay, identifying the depth and exactitude of the domain knowledge contained in it. The developers are keen to stress that this only covers one part of the assessment process. A human expert still needs to consider creative and innovative aspects of the essay. That may welll be the case, and indeed could give the markers more opportunity to concentrate on these aspects of the student's work. However, the danger is always there that the machine's assessment will be trusted too much, and the human dimension will be forgotten due to a lack of time.

Unsurprisingly, students in the US have responded positively to the system. After all, it the aspects of their work that the system rewards, repetition of fatcs and content, are much easier to understand and perfect than the higher level skills that the machine cannot analyse. Worse still, it seems that the students are allowed to submit their essays into the system as many times as they like until the deadline is reached. Hence they may be adapting their work to meet the assessment criteria of the machine, which are inevitably limited.

My conjecture is this. Lecturers often do not want to be too explicit about assessment criteria. There is a chance that such over-determination stifles student creativity and innovation, precisely the characteristics of intelligence that higher education is supposed to develop. Machine marking may well act against this.


Robert O'Toole : 09 Apr 2005 22:09 |  Tags:   |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem