 I'm somebody who loves a good adventure story. I'm very attracted to the uncertainty of the outcome, the endless possibilities, the excitement that the journey brings, and I was always drawn to the work of Walter McGinty, who said that good teachers have to have doubts, and it's from the uncertainty it's from the uncertainty that great incredible things can happen. And unlike most days, today I found myself in a room with adventurers, with explorers, with pioneers, each one of us with a different story to tell, and I'll do well to beat the tarantula, I'll do my best over the next six minutes. But let me tell you one of my stories. Every story, of course, has a villain, a victim, and a hero. So I need you to picture the scene, large class, an excess of 150 students, undergraduate students, completing a mandatory module. They receive some lectures each week, supported by online and by tutorial classes. The lecture material is made available online through Moodle or Blackboard. We do things in the class, we fire yeast, we do quizzes, we use cahoots, we get them to do use post-its, we do a range of things in our classrooms now to try and keep them engaged, guest speakers, et cetera. They're required to complete a continuous assessment in week nine or 10 for 30%. Took a lot of effort to design a clever, I thought was a clever continuous assessment, a multiple choice exam. And it had two purposes, one to give them a summative grade to let them know how they were doing. Second, of course, which was more important for me, was it was a formative exercise. So to prepare them for the final exam they had six or seven weeks later. So everything seems great, except there's one problem. They're only scoring 44% on average. 44%, I told you I needed a villain, I found it, it's those lazy spoon-fed millennials. Those students who just won't do a tap are at least when I walked up and down the corridors and attended meetings in GMIT, that's the common narrative that I heard. I didn't buy into that to be honest. So I read a bit, I spoke to colleagues and I chatted to students and after a couple of liters of coffee, I actually realized that the students in fact were the victims of the peace. The victor, they had, my assessment was wrong. The way I was approaching it was wrong and it wasn't right on students and I needed to do something about it. And this was also quite personal to me because they were scoring 40% in my field and then I realized something even more important. I was actually also a victim. So I decided I wanted to do something about it and I looked inside my own discipline. In the mid-70s to where I had two academics, Hackman and Oldham, we came up with a model which sort of said it wasn't the characteristics of the job holder, it was the characteristics of the job that led to positive outcomes and they're here on the right-hand side, increased motivation, increased satisfaction, increased engagement with what it is that you're doing. So my idea was quite simple, I changed it and I said I'm gonna have an assignment characteristics model. Simply, I was gonna do something, if I could, that would be more meaningful to students. That would give them more autonomy and it would actually enable me to give them as much feedback as possible. Remember, there's over 150 in the class, okay? So my particular module, my area is human resource management and it was a second year undergraduate module for human resource management students. So I looked at the module learning outcomes. I looked at the content, I looked at the sequence in which we could deliver the content and I said, right, I'm gonna get them to set up mock recruitment agencies. Now I just wanna take a second to look at the photograph because you'll get an idea of what they're at. I didn't tell them to get dressed like this. I didn't tell them to organize the room like this. In this particular incident, because some of you might be curious why is Roy Keane up on the wall, they chose the job. The job in this particular incident was a marketing development officer for the Connect region for the Football Association of Ireland. And what the three lads did was ask Anya, they showed her the picture of Roy Keane. First of all, did she know who he was? She did, right? And then they said, Roy Keane is very, very brash. Is he the kind of person that the FAI should be using to promote soccer? I didn't tell them to write that question. They came up with that themselves, okay? So I'll go on. Basically what the students had to do is they, I chose a group-based assignment for a number of reasons. First of all, employers expect better soft skills from graduates, including teamwork. And forming groups also reduced the number of assessments I had to assess, which freed me up to give them more forward feedback more often. I also adapted a group assessment approached by Blocksham and Boyd, which is in one of the teaching exemplars, to address legitimate student concerns over having a passenger on their team. Students were required to self-form their groups. I didn't do it, agree on a group name, create and sign a group contract, identify a job that they might like to interview for on graduation. I prescribed very, very little. They had to work it all out themselves. They had to collaborate. When will we meet? What we do? Keep minutes at the meeting. Store documents online. They had to interview people, record the interview so that I could have a look at back at them afterwards. They did everything. Autonomy, okay? Groups were encouraged to sit together at lectures and I would punctuate the lecture hour with opportunities for them to discuss what I had just spoken about. Time Table tutorial classes were used, essentially, as feedback sessions. I told them, come together as a group because you're supposed to be there. And show me what you've done, and I'll tell you whether you're on the right track or not. They came. Students advertised the jobs amongst their tutorial class and they also then applied for the jobs of their tutorial class mates. So creating sort of cells within the tutorial class and they all worked together like that. Documentation was saved online and made available to me so that I could review it afterwards. And then finally, the students self-assessed the individuals within the group so that I could individualize the group's mark. Better performers got a higher mark because that's what the students thought. Weaker performers didn't because that's what the student group thought. So the impact. Average student performance went from 44% to 66% the first year I did it. I thought it was great. But I said I better go and ask the students anyway and find out what exactly had happened. So I asked them, 80% enjoyed being able to influence the marks of others. 97% said that it was fun. 97% said they enjoyed working with others. 100% found it challenging. So with the best way to kind of get a sense of what the students thought is to actually hear it from themselves. They liked doing things. They liked shortlisting. They liked interviewing. They thought that this actually meant something. They got to know people in their class better. I tweaked the assignment after receiving the students feedback and then I did it a second year and it went from 66% to 69%. I mentioned at the start that every story has a villain, victims and a hero. And I think the hero in this piece is actually the spirit of adventure. It's the curiosity to try and understand more and to take action. And that famous academic Tina Turner famously saying that we don't need another hero, but all of us in this room know that that's not true. Fellow adventurers, my wish is that we return to college, to our universities and that we fight the villainy of meaningless assessment. And we encourage others to be much, much more heroic with their approaches. And Gurmeel Mahagov.