 So greetings and welcome everyone. My name is Norette Newman, and I am an education specialist here at the Commonwealth of Learning. And together with my colleagues, doctors David Porter and Kirk Paris and Miss Keshe and Feng assisting us, assisting me this morning. We thank you all for investing your time with us. Today we have an amazing panel who are going to speak to us about designing digital assessment. And we're gonna be looking at some examples from the field on how you can design and use authentic and reliable digital assessment tasks and how faculty, academic managers and students respond. Next slide please. Before we dive into the panel introductions, I want to run through a few housekeeping matters with you. Many of you will know that this is the third in a series of online workshops that we have been running on digital assessment. This session is being recorded and it will be available as the other sessions are on Cal's YouTube channel. There will be a post, you're gonna receive some email correspondence inviting you to participate in a post workshop survey. And I also want to remind you, next slide, that there is a opportunity for you to earn a digital badge. So participants in this workshop and the previous workshop can earn recognition of their learning through reflective practice. And here you see two of the badges, the igniter badge on the right of your screen. We'll go to the panelists and you can get a reflector badge. And at the end of this workshop, my colleague, Dr. David Porter will explain to you how you go about doing that. Next slide please. So just to go through a couple of the organization of today's workshop, I'm going to begin with a little bit of context, two minutes on that. And then we're going to go straight into the facilitator sessions. We have three of those sessions. There will be live polls. We will be asking you the audience to respond to questions and share your perspectives in real time. The discussion will be driven, the discussion that follows is going to be driven by your questions and answers. And we would like you to post those questions in the Q&A. You will see a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. And so we would like you to use that to pose your questions rather than the chat. So next slide please, Chantel. So let's begin with a little bit of context. I think the first interesting thing to start with is who are we? Who are the people who are in this workshop today? Most of us, as you will see, are from the tertiary sector, almost half of us. But a sizable proportion have come from primary and secondary sectors. And I think that tells us something. Also great to see that we have persons from ministries of education. We have education officers, consultants, researchers, also joining in this conversation. Next slide please. Also, I think as we consider context, we also have to think about why we are here. And what is it that we want to achieve? What is this workshop about? So just by way of background, this series of workshops really came about as a result of the COVID pandemic. We were hearing at the Commonwealth of Learning, persons were having difficulty managing the process of assessment, designing assessments, using technology appropriately in order to do this. And so we put together this series of workshops. And for those of you who've been with us through the other workshops, you will recall that in the first workshop, we had professors in P. Neymar Koyt and Dr. George Valetsianos who were advocating for learning-centered design as the driver for digital assessment. In the second workshop, we had Professor James Skidmore who explained to us how we can, indeed how we must design for academic integrity. And he showed us strategies for maximizing engagement and minimizing cheating. And today we're going to complete that circle by turning our attention to some concrete examples of assessment that will be reliable and authentic. And so what we're trying, we're hoping this morning is that you will have a good understanding of how one can work with and avoid pitfalls and challenges when trying to ensure that you have the kind of assessment that learners can demonstrate their knowledge and their skills and their competencies. We want the kind of assessment that prepares learners, as it says on the slide, for employability and for promotion and other kinds of things. And to help us to do that this morning, we have three amazing women. The first is Dr. Chantal Moore. Chantal is a lecturer in language and literature and she's a graduate coordinator for the School of Education at the University of the West Indies, Monacampus, Jamaica. And Chantal is also very heavily involved in working with institutions and teachers to build capacity in designing, developing and delivering online courses. Our second panelist this morning will be Dr. Maggie Bukes-Amis. Maggie is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information and Communication Studies at the University of Namibia. And Maggie, like Chantal, is heavily involved in digital learning, helping with e-learning capacity-building activities, ICT, e-learning policy. And she works like, you know, Chantal works across the Caribbean. Maggie also has worked internationally. Our third panelist is Dr. Tashane Haynes-Brown, also from the University of the West Indies, Monacampus in Jamaica. And Tashane has been involved in the area of technology integration for some years now. Indeed, her PhD thesis looked at that in technology integration specifically in education. And she's also quite versed in using software for data analysis, adult learning methods. And so I welcome all three. We are going to start with Chantal. Next slide, please. We are going to start with Chantal. And Chantal is going to focus on how one transforms assessment, given all that we are facing during COVID in the online environment. Chantal, over to you. Welcome, colleagues. I'm Chantal Moore from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. And I'm inviting you to recast your traditional assessment this morning for the online environment. I'll be sharing four examples and hopefully you'll be persuaded to move your traditional assessment over into authentic assessment. Look at the glass before you, plain water. And that is how many of you conceptualize assessment in your classrooms. But assessment really can be reimagined, translated and transformed so that your courses and the tasks that students complete within your courses are enjoyable, refreshing, engaging, exciting. And that's what we're looking towards. So let's get a clear understanding of traditional assessment versus authentic and organic assessment. For the traditional assessment, as teachers, lecturers, facilitators, many times our main focus is just making sure that the students have learned the content. We want to see the degree to which they've acquired the knowledge. And from there, we can now rank them, we can provide them with a grade and we can align them against other students in terms of performance. From the teacher's perspective still, you are looking to get a snapshot view or understanding of what students know or they are taken away in terms of content from your course. But really, we ought not to be looking solely at the content of students and measuring students' knowledge of content. In our courses, we need to move towards something more about testing students' proficiency and competency. And it's through authentic assessment that we can do that by getting students to perform real life tasks, getting them to demonstrate what they have learned. And we guide them along the process through feedback. And in that way, students can now come to value their learning. And for the teacher, teachers will get a better sense of what students can do with that knowledge. The application is what authentic assessment is most concerned with, applying it to realize situations in meaningful ways. We have traditional assessment tasks on the left and some authentic ones on the right. And we know the traditional ones and some of us, we know the authentic ones. And we have to know, think about how we can transform or translate or reimagine some of these traditional face-to-face assessment into authentic digital assessment. It's not too difficult. It requires creativity. It requires time, but it is absolutely possible. And you're gonna find that when you do so, you as well as your students turn around and enjoy the learning experience so much more. So I start off with my first student, Aisha. And Aisha had a particular assignment to do. In this language education writing course, Aisha was supposed to maintain an active e-journal throughout the 13 weeks semester. Each week, Aisha would reflect on what was discussed, shared in class, and Aisha would write a reflection of anywhere between one to three pages. And at the end of the 13 weeks, Aisha would have gotten feedback on each written draft and then she was supposed to select her best five reflections to include in an e-journal. And then Aisha knew beforehand what she was being assessed on in producing this e-journal. Providing rubrics, very clear rubrics will help students to conceptualize, internalize, and produce a kind of assessment that you want, something authentic and organic. So Aisha knew that I was testing her level of insight or engagement with the topics we discussed in class, the theories and so on. I wanted to see Aisha's quality of expression as well as the functionality of her ideas and definitely her creativity. So for this task, Aisha attended a short story. And so I'm sharing chapter four of her short story with you. And following the chapter four, she came up with her conclusion, only three lines. And I felt that Aisha, although there was promise in her work, she could stretch herself a little bit more. So in my feedback to Aisha, I commended her on her creativity, but I said to her that she needed to expand on the conclusion to reflect on the importance of journaling in the writing process. I wanted her to think about how she could use a technique in a creative way to transform teaching. And I wanted her to think about the value of taking risks or creating something new with words. How then could she use this knowledge and convey to her students and bring out the knowledge and wisdom in her own writing classrooms and for herself when she became a real teacher. Aisha is a novice teacher in training. So at the end again, I said very good writing here and that she should seriously consider publishing the work because it had the promise of doing well as a short story out there in a real life context. When Aisha revised her conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was extended beyond the three lines. So much so that I saw her stepping out of her comfort zone. She said, my comfort zone has always been poetry. So it was a great experience exploring this genre. I've discovered that we're all writers and it is merely for us to hone our craft. Writing is used in our daily lives consciously and subconsciously from shopping lists, WhatsApp messages and Facebook posts. So definitely Aisha was learning to write. Aisha was sharing this knowledge with her students and Aisha was having fun along the way. The second authentic assessment I want to share is that done by my student Nadia. Nadia was actually doing the same assessment piece as Aisha did. An e-journal where she is reflecting her thoughts about how she's coming to appreciate the writing process and to teach writing to her students. Nadia, however, didn't choose to use the short story format that Aisha used. Instead, Nadia decided to use a blog, an e-journal, a kind of blog. So let's look at Nadia's blog. So Nadia's blog is entitled The Teacher's Self. And in this blog, Nadia has on our homepage a little video that she did. And so as the video, you'll hear the video, but I want to show you the first drafts of Nadia's work. Nadia's first drafts, as you can see them, they're flat, just typed up pieces of reflection that she has pasted onto the screen and the feedback given by me, her facilitator, her lecturer at that time. So what Nadia did coming out of these first drafts was that she revised them. And in her revision, if you notice, there were no longer appearing typed up work, but then this is now incorporated into a space that could facilitate multimedia. And so it really felt like this was an authentic piece of work because it's her blog. She says, a writer's by nature, a dreamer, a conscious dreamer, so she addresses it their teacher's self. I cannot remember ever being taught how to write. Sure I had classes where we learned the meanings of words and how to use them in sentences and so on and so forth. And then she says, reflecting on my first, on my time in school, I've realized that most of my writing was done on command. Most times the English teacher would come to class and instruct us to write a story about or vacation or write a letter to a friend about a topic we were studying. And so Nadia writes out her thoughts, her growth or understanding of what writing meant for her and then how she now would teach the writing to students. She says, dear teacher self, the way you will teach in today's classroom will have to change. You will be teaching the generation Zeds as well as the digital natives of the world. These are the most technological savvy people you will ever encounter in the classroom. Today's class has brought home and she continues. And so we can, we actually were brought into Nadia's world as a teacher self, as she grows, as she reflects on each piece of writing that she does for this class and produces a more authentic work that she is now able to put within the blog space. So Nadia now in her blog, she has a video and she shares this in her video with us. Let's get a sense of Nadia. Welcome to the teacher self. It is my interactive blog or website, if you can call it that which shares my reflections and my music on my time in ADLE 5110 or writing secondary school. I have learned a lot during the semester and based on the teachings that I have received, I've put together my little reflections on my ability to teach writing and how has my writing changed over the years? What will be my approach to writing as a teacher going to the classroom? One of the main things that I've taken from this course is that writing is a process. It is time consuming. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of brain power and it takes out of vocabulary too. Right. So that's Nadia. You can take the time out to visit her online and check out her blog to get a better sense of how she has grown and how she has developed. What I like about Nadia's piece is that it was very creative. She was able to bring many media forms to bear on her blog and that way it was not flat and it was a pleasure going through. And this is what lifts the assignment from just the printed out information on an A4 quality paper and you hand that in. This becomes something that Nadia can know keep for life if she wants and she can share that with colleagues or her students and it records her growth as a writer and how to teach writing to students. So the third student's work I wanna share is that of Wesley's. Wesley did a self-access piece and the assessment task is on the screen before you. What is Wesley doing here? Wesley had the option of using a PowerPoint or Word or a webpage and electronic game or video or even social media or an e-anthology to create an original self-access tool, not a handout. We didn't want just the paper-based thing. We wanted it to be lifted off the page and to become real alive. We wanted Wesley to apply his knowledge. So Wesley was supposed to think about an aspect of writing or grammar or overcoming writer's block. One of the areas in his classroom is English classroom that he knew students had a challenge with. And so he was now to create a self-access tool for any student in that class to be able to use without Wesley the teacher being present. How could the student use it, learn it and benefit from whatever it is that Wesley was teaching? And in this assignment, I was very specific. I asked that they indicate the grade level of the student who will be using the self-access tool, the academic abilities of the students as well, because we needed to know how appropriate and relevant the self-access tool is to the academic level and ability of the students. I wanted the students as well to speak to the particular weakness they were addressing by creating the self-access tool. And this tool should span anywhere between five to 10 minutes in delivery. So let's see what Wesley eventually came up with. There was, of course, that provisional that it wasn't about your technological savvy. You just needed to be creative because authentic assessment is not necessarily testing students' technological competence, but it's trying to get students to venture out to take risks to see how they can now apply what is learned in the classroom to real-life situations. So let's see what Wesley was able to come up with. So here's Wesley's self-access tool on pre-writing skills. But now in the house with your boy, big snipes, let's get right into it. Now you've been given a homework assignment from your teacher to write an essay on whatever topic you choose. Now you are an important person. You have places to go, people to see, and not a whole lot of time to do it in. So you decide that you're gonna go and you're gonna get it done quickly. You sit at your computer or you have your tablet and you start typing. There's some things that you need to do. You serious? That's right. I'm gonna show you how to improve your pre-writing skills. We're gonna talk about how to know it, how to plan it, and how to work it. That's right, right here in the house. Means that you have to have a clear understanding for the task at hand. That means you can close your eyes and you know without a shadow of a doubt that your teacher gave you a specific homework assignment to do because you, like I knew, that somebody in your class is gonna come to you later on and they're gonna be like, what? Um, excuse me, I don't mean to be a baller in all. I was just wondering if you knew what the assignment was that that teacher had explained in the class. I wasn't really paying too much attention to it in class, so would you be able to tell me exactly what it was? Make sure that you get everything you need to get done on time before you're deadline. So you do that timeline. Manage your time. Then you drop some knowledge right there. And that brings me to the next part. My favorite part of planning is the brainstorm. Now you're gonna find there are thousands of in the middle of a cloud. And from there, I then go on to putting one of my ideas down around that cloud. The point is to ensure that you get all of your information down in your brainstorm. Because the next part is to go through and piece everything together. I like Wesley's self-access too, because really what it is doing, it is actually reflecting his creativity. It is also showing us that Wesley has thought about it from the student's perspective. And Wesley is now trying to speak the language of students so that they will actually understand how to go about pre-writing. He's very creative. He's in a role-playing. He's using the language of the students. He's using manipulatives. And even though the technological competence was not what was being addressed here, that came out. And you could see that Wesley was demonstrating skills that are really necessary for this century, for this classroom. And I applaud him for his efforts there. So now the fourth authentic assessment I'm sharing with you was done by my student Karima Smith. What is particularly interesting about this assignment is that it's actually embedded. It's an assignment in an assignment in an assignment. Let me explain what's happening here. A group of lecturers from the Bahamas Technical and Vocational Institute, they were trained in how to develop online courses. Coming out of that first round of training, a handful of them were selected to become trainers of other faculty who might not have attended that initial workshop. And Karima was one of those who was selected to be a trainer. So after the training session of the trainers, the summative task was for them to create a workshop of 20 to 30 minutes in length. And this workshop could be done face to face or blended or virtually. It was up to the trainer to decide on how the workshop was to be done. But basically they were going to be working with anywhere between one, two or three other colleagues to train them on how to design their own online courses. So Karima did that assignment. And if you notice the rubric is right there for you. Very clear because they needed that kind of information to proceed. Karima knew that to get the best grade possible for this assignment. She needed to have identified an aspect of the workshop that she found particularly compelling and she was supposed to think about how she would share that with her small group of staff that she was training. She ought to have employed strategies of Andragogy, coaching or mentoring, and to see how she was helping to support a community of practice within this training session. She was also to make sure that as she shared in the session, she would stimulate creativity and engagement as she delivered the content. And in total, we wanted Karima to showcase that she had the skills and competences to be a trainer of trainers. So Karima attempted the task and I'm going to share with you what her attempt looks like. I'm going to be scanning through very quickly. We won't get to see the fullness of it because Karima's workshop spanned the full 30 minutes. So after a while, I will just drag the marker along for you to see bits and pieces of Karima's workshop in progress. Thank you for joining me, Ms. Hall. And Ms. King. Hi. So today I'm going to start sharing my screen. Okay. Okay, so I just want to welcome you all to today's VLE Teacher's training. Thank you. The presentation is being done by myself, Karima A. Smith. And below, you will find my contact information. So just in case you need any assistance during the upcoming weeks of preparing your VLE templates, the time is fast approaching. My contact information is Smith K at btvi.edu.bs or 502.6378. I will be more than willing to accommodate you and assist you, all right? Okay. Just some background information, right? It is the end of the month, July 2020, and faculty of the Bahamas Technical and Vocational Institute is required to develop and design their courses in the VLE. Many instructors are unfamiliar with this new learning environment and some are very anxious about where and how to even start. But these are the changes that COVID-19 has brought upon us. One of the COL trainees, Ms. Karima A. Smith, me, and our fellow teammates have devided a plan to provide faculty with a series of training sessions that will be conducted via Zoom. Under the theme, tips, tools, and techniques for designing your VLE templates. So today's first session, the series of four to five, is for us to just provide tips on how the overall layout of our courses should look when they are designed and developed in the VLE. As Philip McGraw once said, if you don't have a plan, days turns into weeks, weeks turns into months, months turn into years. And before you know it, you're looking back saying, I should have had a plan. So the purpose, and that's why today we chose to start off our sessions by presenting our colleagues with a class picture or shared vision as to how their courses should look and how what the process should look like when they're developing and designing their courses in the VLE so it is not so overwhelming when they first start, okay? When you would have gone into the VLE for the first time, your templates may have looked like this or virtually empty. Sometimes you just have the announcements and the dates. But our goal ultimately is for our VLE templates to look like this, where they start off with a welcoming picture and where the course content is developed. So in order for us to achieve this, we should consider three questions. There are three questions we should consider when we are developing the structure of the VLE. We should ask ourselves, one, is my space attractive? Is my course interactive? Is my course student-centered? When we say attractive, we want our courses to look appealing. As soon as the student enters our VLE, they should say, well, I would love coming into the space all the time. This isn't dreary, this isn't blind. When we look at it being interactive, does it welcome feedback from the students? Do students have to perform and interact with each other even though they're not in a face-to-face environment? It's still sort of like if they still have their forms or community feedback, you have critique of it, all right? So this is how the business communication course template looks in the VLE, all right? My honest, look at feeling a little foggy. So I have to use the arrows. I don't know if you can see it. I'm going a bit fast, but there's a lot. From looking at this, it's consistent meaning you have the same, some of the same elements in each week. So for instance, you have your PowerPoints. I see the PowerPoints in each week. You have your learning objectives. If there are videos or articles relating to the topic for that particular week, as well as assignments, I also, it's also attractive with the pictures. It's appealing. It will make me as a learner want to look at it for like that term. Yeah, interactive, I mean, very attractive. It would want me to learn it, you know, what else my instructor has to say for the next week. Right. So it keeps me exciting to know what's happening week after week, upload and assignments, the information about Zoom, the net-a-kit, online net-a-kit, information like that. I think also it could be added in that section for the announcements, which is very important. I don't see an introduction or welcome page. Right. I don't know if, I don't know if you're all seeing that. Right. Yeah. So you know exactly the elements that you need to tick off. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So let's go back to our PowerPoints. Okay. Alrighty. Now let's do just a recap of what we did. Nice, ladies. So what is the purpose and benefits now that we've discussed it and now we were able to compare the two, compare and contrast the two VLE templates? What is the purpose and benefits now that you see in an option of the welcome message, the instructor's welcome message? What do you- All right. Thanks. And Karima, I'm going to pause her here. Just the point of that, as Karima was working with her two colleagues, she was actually practicing some of the strategies for adult learners and for gorgeous strategies where she was getting them to engage, she was getting them to link to their own experiences as lecturers. She got them to look at a real life course and to make suggestions about how the course could be improved. And also we could see where her learners, her colleagues were learning and there were, from the responses they were given, we could see that when they came to create in their own courses, they would know what are the strengths and challenges to address, what are the areas that should be included and where the variety should be to bring about a present and pleasing looking course and all of that. So when you look more closely at Karima's assignment, her authentic assignment, we saw that she was blending in teaching presence in how to create a virtual learning space. She was encouraging social presence and definitely the cognitive presence was there because she was providing them with information. So it was a pretty interactive session and I saw that all three of them had a wonderful time in that space. So colleagues, in looking back at the four authentic assessment pieces, I would want to say that they had some commonalities. For one, the creativity was evident in all four. There was a emerging technological competence as well. There were signs of engagement for the learners who would be utilizing the resources or those who were part of the learning experience. You could see that there was interactivity and engagement. Definitely each student got an opportunity to share content but above and beyond sharing the content. What was important in these authentic pieces of assessment was that the students were applying the content. You could see that they understood the content and they were now using the content in realized situation. For Nadia, it was her blog or e-blog that she created on a space on the internet for students to access at their own time. For Aisha, she was able to create a short story which she actually went on to look about publishing and sharing in a realized space as well. For Wesley, his self-access tool, he was able to put that on YouTube and any student can actually use that tool to learn about pre-writing skills. And finally, for Karima, her workshop something that her institution can record and can use to train others about how to design a virtual learning space. What are the pros and cons and things to look out for as you're developing your own course space? So all in all, the assignments for the students turned out to be fun, fun, fun. And you can see that for the four assignments there is that high quality to the assignment are quality assurance that resonates well with me, the teacher, knowing that the students had produced work of their own and it's work that was good. So in wrapping up, I want us to look at the implications for designing authentic assessment, looking at it from the student's perspective and also from the lecturer, teacher, facilitator perspective. When you give students authentic assessment, colleagues, what is gonna happen is that you are making the learning fun, dynamic and engaging for all your students. It's going to stimulate academic integrity because it's an assignment that, you know, that morphed organically from your course. It's not something necessarily that you are taking from out there to fit into your course. It's an assignment that came out of your course in its own way. And so because of that, students are not likely to find it elsewhere to just, you know, copy and paste it or plagiarize it and deliver it to you. It's actually keeping them in align with or in alignment with academic integrity. It also supports the students' development in terms of technological skills or whatever other skills, communication skills that are applicable for real life contexts. And students know when they are doing their assignments and certainly when they have completed their assignments and they're looking back at their work, they know for sure that they have grown, that they have developed, and there's that sense of appreciation for this school, evident in their reflexivity, in their reflections. Their assignments, when they are authentic, they encourage deep, not surface, deep learning. And it also encourages students to take risks and it promotes ownership of the task as students are acquiring these new skills for life. The one challenge that students might quibble with is that these assignments, they are not instant. They are not one shot. It's not an assignment that you can do on the fly or at the last minute. These authentic assessments, if you, as a teacher, think them out and align them with your core objectives, you're going to see that the students are going to have to think deep, they have to plan well, and they are going to go through stages of revision and accommodation based on feedback from others and so on. So for me, the authentic assessment asks the students to delve deep and to own and to grow as a result, more so than the traditional assignments that are more on the page and flat. And so what is it for the lecturers? What is the benefit to the lecturer? Well, a lecturer who is thinking about working with authentic assessment, you are going to find that your creativity is stretched because as you think about your course and the modules, the objectives, you're going to be thinking about how you can create tasks which will get students to demonstrate the knowledge that you're covering within the modules. So it's going to ask you to be creative. It's going to ask you to constantly be thinking and re-imagining your assessment. Additionally, it's where the assignments turn out to be worthwhile reading but you, the lecturer, highly anticipated because you're waiting to see what it is that your students are going to come with next. Know that there is no two assignments that the students will do. Let me try and explain. It might be the same assignment but the pieces that the students submit, no two will be alike because the students take their own pathway, their own turn, their own creativity is brought to bear. So yes, it's the same task that's assigned but in the product that students deliver, you'll be surprised and pleasantly too by what students turn out. And finally, it helps you, the lecturer, to be able to build up an arsenal, a repertoire of modern resources that you can use for future classroom teaching and even as scaffolding for your students. You can actually share this with students who are novice students who have left so that the students always have that resource or storehouse place to go back to and look at models that they can mirror or they can adapt for their own contextual spaces when they go off to teach in their real-life classrooms. Yes, the downside. It requires a lot from the teacher in terms of time and in terms of labor. It's highly intensive there because it asks you from the upfront, the get go to really think about your courses. But the good thing about that is when you have given a careful thought and you get a chance to modify and improve on it, then that is going to be something that you can continue to build on over time. And as you build on it, it's going to require less labor and less time and you have models that you can work with. So that's what I would like to share with you about authentic assessment and hope that you found this section really interesting and engaging and that you would want to move from setting traditional type assessments only to incorporate more authentic assessment, especially digital assessment in your courses. Thank you. And it's now over to Maggie. Thank you very much, Shantel, for that. We also would like to thank, I think, Nadia, and Aisha, and Wesley, and Karima. It was very invigorating, I think, to see how they dealt with those assignments. And we thank you for those examples. So our next speaker is, I introduced her earlier, Dr. Maggie Bukes-Amiz, who comes to us from the University of Namibia. And Maggie is going to take a slightly different perspective from what Shantel shared. Shantel focused very much on the learners and to some extent the faculty as well. Maggie is going to look very much at this issue of digital assessment, reliability and authenticity from the perspective of management, from the perspective not necessarily of the student and the faculty alone, but the management as well. So Maggie, over to you. Thank you so much, Mary Heta, for that introduction and Shantel for setting us off today. I should start by greeting all of you because this could be afternoon or evening or morning, depending on where you are logging in. And I just briefly checked in the chat and I could see people are from all over the world. So welcome once again. I think Mary Heta did a great job in welcoming all of you to our session. And as she reiterated already, that Shantel took the approach of the faculty and student perspective, but I would like to move on to maybe how faculty and management could look at this collectively together. So next slide, Shantel, in that regard. And with that, I would also like to share our experiences, our struggles and maybe even some lessons learned in this regard. And as I was introduced, I'm from the Center for Open Distance and E-Learning. In short, we are referred to as Kodal at the University of Namibia. So Shantel, next slide, please. Thank you. So as you can see, my approach is to also still hone into our overarching theme in terms of digital assessment, designed for authenticity and reliability, but specifically from faculty and management perspective. And as we all familiar last year, when COVID hit round about March, most of us had to pivot our learning and teaching activities online from both the student perspective as well as the academic and faculty member perspective. And in that regard, we merely really engaged in most of our countries in what we called emergency remote teaching. And as part of that emergency remote teaching, we also had to make sure that we were taking our digital assessments along in the process. And this was supposed to happen now, not just like in my case, for a center where your mandate was only for distance and online students before, but during COVID, it actually now had to spread to accommodate our face-to-face students as well across our two types of students, whether they're full-time and part-time. And that meant that we had to take our academic fraternity along with us in that regard. Those at the forefront, like the example of Shantel and that you will also see from Tashane after me in terms of practical examples that they were able to engage with their students as faculty members. So as a result of this, at management level, you also had to pause and you had to rethink what it is that you had to do differently as institutions of higher learning. And during the pre-poll results, we could see that most of our audience participants come from a post-secondary setup, but also from other setups as well. And therefore we are addressing as we promised you in our leaflet summary that we will address all of you in that regard. So the first thing we had to do and we could move to the next slide again, Shantel, is that we had to rethink our moderation tools. I think this is something all of us can identify with because when COVID hit, most of our moderation tools specifically for tests and for exams were maybe mostly for paper-based, sit-in and physical tests and exams. And we really had to think out of the box and even without the box in making sure that we could redesign our different moderation tools. So we had to get together and we had to rethink how could we redesign the moderation tools for what would be your end of term, sort of almost like summative exams coming up towards the end of that semester, which in our case for an example was semester one after from beginning of March up until the end of May. So that's what we had to rethink. We also had to rethink the angle of quality assurance. It's one thing to say, yes, teaching is effective in the classroom and teaching will not be so effective perhaps online, but it's another to look at it from a quality perspective. And I often say to people, don't be surprised that even in a classroom we are not often having quality. So yes, that was the first part of what we really had to do and place our hands on effectively and work together with academics and through their management in their faculties to make sure that moderation tools were redesigned for diversified, but also for online assessments as well as exams. So that was the first example that I thought I could share with you as our audience today in terms of a faculty and management perspective working hand in hand. And I could see a number of my Namibian colleagues also locked in. So I guess some of them can testify to us this or not, whether it was a reality. We all know it was a struggle, but we made it in the end. Then over and above this, if you go to the middle part of that example where I'm trying to zoom in in terms of what did we do to reduce chances of cheating? And here I would like to say that we all know that we can never get rid of cheating completely, whether it's in a face-to-face environment or whether it's an online environment, but for sure we can work around what previous speakers in I think workshop series two also referred to and that is academic integrity. The whole essence of all of this should be around academic integrity. So in order to reduce chances of cheating, you know, we had to think from a design perspective. How could we design the learning management system in use? And at that stage was also advocated for in the university to be the primary learning management system in use for the university as Moodle in terms of making sure that, you know, things can become more reliable and in terms of credibility as well. And that's when we started to think about the design of our LMS more specifically. We have been thinking about it before, but when more and more users came on board, like for an example, if I can just off the cuff, give you an example that previously we were responsible for 6,000 distance mode students, but during COVID we automatically became responsible for 32,000 university students in terms of the various modes and across the various modes. And we really had to think carefully. So what we were thinking of from a management together with faculty staff members and they often receive training from our center in this regard. And this is really the crux of the matter for us as well. You cannot just pervert online and talk about emergency remote teaching or even online learning and teaching specifically if you are also not focusing on capacitating people. So we have been capacitating our academic staff members by availing training calendars at convenient times for them. And things that we were looking at specifically was for an example, test randomization to randomize questions in a question bank for an example, encouraging our academics to come up with more and more questions in their question banks and not just maybe one or two or three or up to 20 but rather to encourage them to come up with bigger question banks. And if they did that, which actually happened that allowed them the opportunity to practice things like question randomization. Then also we looked at specific aspects and this is all once again, I'm linking you back to this example of reducing chances of cheating. It's still linked to that. We also looked at the fact that we had to time the tests very specifically. So training was also available to faculty members in this regard that you have to even time your questions. And why do you have to time questions? Maybe once again to reduce other options of what students can look at and maybe using various devices at the same time while participating in an online test or an exam or even an assignment for that matter. So timing of the questions mattered a lot. Things that maybe faculty at this point in time would not be aware of but from a technical point of view given the learning management system which is host in the center that I'm directing and the staff within the center was also to look at safe exam browser. Trying to avoid that multiple browser windows can be opened and copying, pasting. But hang on, as we were trying to think we are doing a cool thing and it could work. One Friday evening, one of our professors popped me a WhatsApp image and he said to me, is this what you call a safe browser, Maggie? Because then he showed me how the student couldn't open various browser windows but then opted to open them on another device. So there it is. We one day said to our vice chancellor, coming up with examples of how to reduce cheating is almost like coming up with an antivirus for a virus. And the more we were coming up with an antivirus for a virus the more these things were cracked and hacked. So yes, there you have it but you have to be vigilant about them and you have to be aware about them and you have to make sure that it's around instilling that ethical values and that academic integrity that we were talking about. Another thing that example that also proved very useful for us during that time was the number of attempts that you allowed students to participate either during an online test or an online exam because at some stage when the government regulations came out and we all had to be locked down and work from home the one thing we managed was as a university of Namibia was to keep learning open. And by doing so, we had to be very vigilant about everything we were doing around the learning and teaching aspects as a center standing for open distance and in learning as well within the university. And we were so blessed that we had that experience from before and we could use it as a blueprint to help our full-time colleagues that came on board in a rush due to COVID. And I'm sure in one of the meetings we had recently some of them said, sorry doc, but there is no going back. And that is just like fruit to my soul. When I hear people saying, we are not saying technology is everything. No, no, not at all. No, are we saying technology first, not at all. We always consider the aspect that it's pedagogy first and technology to follow. We would not change that at all within the mindset of an academic. So another example, as I said, that also worked well for us was the fact that we gave more attempts in some instances and that also then in the end, the faculty member or the academic staff member could then just use the best attempt or whatever he or she would have decided to take. But allowing of different attempts helped us with other problems like, for an example, an electricity cut while you were busy taking your online test or your online exam. And you had an opportunity to just take another attempt again. Somebody for an example asked in the chat about open book and he is, we have encouraged open book through essay style, you know, using your learning management system. So we have really tried our level best. I'm not saying we've succeeded in everything, but certainly we have tried. Then some institutions even in the region here in Africa in the continental context also went for very expensive proctoring software, which we for an example thought is too expensive. And there are other ways and means that we could work around reducing cheating and instilling more emphasis on academic integrity than just wanting to talk about, it's easier to cheat online. So we tried all of that. And I'm once again reminded by our previous speakers from previous, you know, sessions who clearly took us through the whole essence of academic integrity. And maybe before I go to my last example and to my last slide later on, can I ask for a poll at this point in time? I would specifically go for poll number three right now. Let's engage the audience with us. There you have the poll. Is it easier to cheat in digital assessments than in traditional assessments? You can decide. Is it a yes? Is it a no or not sure? Can you proceed to post your feedback? Just a few more seconds and we'll end the polling. Thank you. There we have it. There we have the results. And I focused also on what people are bringing up in terms of indeed the truth. It's an easy, simple question that we are throwing at you but it depends on the number of variables. That we won't deny. It's like I said, it's not so straightforward. And no online assessment is like a copying and pasting exercise at all, not whatsoever. So it does depend on the number of variables but the majority of you indicated yes as you can see there's 62% with some going for no and some going for not sure depending on how you looked at it. So that's fair enough from my perspective. We can then move on. I'm staying on the same slide. We can close the poll because you'll have access to all of these later. And I'm moving to that third example about the repurposing of the digital assessments. Now this was also something that we reflected long and hard about and we had to rethink our approaches and we had to repurpose what we did before in terms of digital assessments and the experience of what we had brought before to that we had to also sort of reflect and rethink how we could redo that going forward. So as part of a repurposing of a digital assessment what we did was we came together and came up with an example of how could we really zoom in in terms of these particular aspect of academic integrity in order to kind of reduce cheating online. We know that there are lots to do and lots that we have to do more to get that statement depending on the variables and the different angles and types of assasements like Chantal took us through in a while. While we think about those things we have to think along this so that that perception can be reduced. I'm not saying taken away completely but can be reduced at some point in time so that we move ahead but we also need our quality assurance agencies along with us. I hear people thinking that it's better to teach in a face-to-face environment and therefore also better to have exams in a face-to-face setup and hang on. We tried it with all our final year exit candidates because we believed that as management team members that we need to make sure that a quality product will exit the university. Therefore we took all the other years from year one to three online for online exams and the final years like our medical school students and so on and all the other disciplines in their final years. We took them through face-to-face exams and what was the first complaint? Hang on, look at our masks. On the inside of the masks we had all the crypt notes inside there from the student angle as well. That's why I'm saying we have to be so careful to think that cheating is either easier or it's more prone for this type environment than the other but I can definitely concur and agree with people that are saying we have to look at it holistically and from different perspectives and from different variables point of view. So in the repurposing example we actually came up with what we wanted to call and called effectively an honor pledge and this honor pledge was built around the idea that we had to make sure that people, our students will engage in this honor pledge before they would be able to move on with their assessments and that's besides the fact that you have anti plagiarism software already built into your LMS as a third party software in all other ways and means like your academic integrity policy also in the face of our students and so on we still had to think of this honor pledge. So I could go to the next slide and that's actually where I'm going to end because we don't have enough time and we are three presenters that would each like to bring something to you as our diversified audience in my case this evening in your case maybe morning or afternoon depending on where you are from. So here's our example of the honor pledge that we took up to Senate level for approval in order to use it as part of our improving remember our topic about reliability and authenticity which is more coupled also to your skill set that you want your student to exit with and that's why it's so important that we link our outcomes with our assessments and do backward curriculum assessment mapping and things like that. So that was our honor pledge and we managed to administer it for students to click on it and to before they could proceed as you could see they're not available unless the activity is marked complete. So we had to force them. So I'm going to end ladies and gentlemen and wonderful audience and brilliant engagement in the chat and in the Q and A section with Jodi Green and what she reminded us of. And the quote from her is that we shouldn't or we should actually stop worrying about cheating and rather talk more and more about academic integrity. And with that, ladies and gentlemen I think there's a smooth hand over now to Marietta to introduce our last speaker but I thank you from this side of the world and I hope you have enjoyed the session with me and with Chantel and with Chashane. Thank you. Maggie, thank you so much for that. I can tell you that much of what you have said resonates with our listeners one person wrote I just had that experience in the chat and I know that your examples of how to crack the hacks really, I think people will benefit from that and everybody loved the pedagogy first Maxim. So thank you. We're going to move straight to our final presenter today. That's Tashane, Dr. Tashane Haynes Brown and Tashane is going to focus her presentation. Again, we're going back to students and faculty but she is going to focus on skills. How do we deal with those subject areas like medicine, TVET, the performing arts, teacher education in particular. How do we manage design, manage and use assessment that has to be practical. Tashane, over to you. Awesome. Thank you so much, Maret. And so we are going to be talking just a little bit about these areas that rely heavily on practical assessments and I'm going to be sharing with you how it is that we navigated this in our context where we were trying to assess teachers who were on practical. Next slide, please. And so traditionally, how have we assessed practical areas? So traditionally, we have utilized competence checklist where we look at the activities or performance outcomes that we think our candidates must be able to do in order to be considered competent in the task that they're being assessed for. So this is a very practical way and it also involves, next slide, taking a look at observation data. This has been a core part of what we do in assessment in practical areas. And so ideally, and the one that is most preferred and attractive to both the candidate and the employers is where we are looking at the observation of the performance under realistic conditions. So in teacher education, we generally send the students out into real life classrooms to implement their lesson plans and to own their skills in those live contexts. But alternatively, performance can also be observed under controlled conditions. And so we also utilize these methodologies as well as the appraisal of a product. And in those kinds of assessment, we generally utilize these kinds of methods that allow you to bring together the mental, physical, and social skills that are needed to carry out the planning, undertaking, and checking of that specified task. And so these products sometimes involve making an actual object or designing a plan or also creating some form of analysis of a product. So these are some of the general ways that we have assessed our methods for practical areas. Next slide, thank you. And what are some of the challenges that we have always faced with assessing our practical areas? No, a lot of times these involve group assessments. And one of the major concerns that lecturers and teachers will raise is that there is that matter of how do we build individual accountability in these kind of group oriented projects because there is that problem that the grade is not likely to be an accurate measure of what any one member of the group knows or can do. And that's one of those big issues we face in the assessment of practical areas that involve group tasks. We also have the concerns relating to the need for all candidates to undertake the same activities under similar conditions in order to demonstrate their practical skills. And this has implications for how do we then collect and analyze the data on the evidence of successful performance, especially when the gathering of data involves observation that is live, right? We also have concerns about quality assurance that process for assessing the practical skills. Is it fair? Is it valid? Is it reliable? What about the rubric, the indicators and the skills that are utilized? How do I apply that rubric and how do I view the scale versus how somebody else will interpret the indicators? When we look at what the student is able to do, would we have the same kinds of conclusions of the observation? So a lot of times, for example, in teacher education, a supervisor may observe the student teacher over time and utilize the rubric. And then that external examiner comes in and their interpretation of the rubric could be different from your interpretation as the primary supervisor. And the students may also have a different concept of what it is that each of these indicators mean. And so that is another concern as we think about the challenges we encounter with assessing the practical areas. There is also that debate about who is it that should be considered the best person to determine whether or not the candidate is performing the task at a certain standard. And of course, coupled with these kinds of concerns that we already faced with practical areas, we now have to consider how can we do this in the digital realm? And this was of course brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Next slide. So what is it that happened in our context? We had our year two student teachers in the middle of their traditional teaching and this was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Next slide. And so we had to determine how would we then assess those core competencies that we had sent our teachers on practicum to demonstrate, right? So those core competencies that we're looking at with our second year teachers were preparation and planning their ability to manage their classrooms, lesson delivery and their ability to reflect on their own teaching. All right, so I want you to think about, we have a poll question for you that seeks your opinion on how it is, what are your views on whether or not practical areas should be assessed digitally? What are your views guys? So we'll just give you a minute to respond to this poll. This is our last poll for today. See the numbers are coming in fast and furious. That is good. Just a few more seconds, maybe 10 seconds more and then Tashane, you can speak to it. Okay, we'll end the polling now, I think. Okay, Tashane, let's have a look at the results. Wow, and this is interesting. There are some persons who believe that practical areas should not be assessed in the virtual space. Interesting. And we have, that looks like 40% of our participants thinking that these things were not meant for digital assessment, right? And then we have the other half, basically 60%, saying that we can find ways of assessing in the digital space or practical areas. So thank you so much guys for sharing your opinions relating to how you feel about assessing practical areas in the digital space. Now, we in our context had no choice but to redesign in order to complete this practical assessment. And so let's take a look at how this was done. Next slide. And so if we bear in mind, the question then that we had to face was, how do we use digital assessment for the practical skills that we wanted to observe and ensure authenticity? And we had to first go back to thinking about those four core competencies that we were trying to assess. So that was the first thing. What are the competencies that you expect the students to display and then design the assessment task around those competencies in order to give the students an opportunity to showcase those skills. And so we had to take a three pronged approach. And what we did was to have the students develop a plan and create a demonstration teaching video. Because that was needed in order to show their ability to plan and deliver their lessons. So they had to do demonstration videos. And we also were fortunate enough to have our schools had moved online. And so we allowed them to work in peers to also go out there and join live sessions and do online co-teaching. And so those activities that were now repurposed for the digital space allowed the student teachers to illustrate their ability to teach the concepts in an interactive way. We also need to take care of that whole matter of assessing their ability to reflect on practice. And so the demonstration teaching videos and the recording of the online co-teaching activity was also coupled with clinical interviews that were conducted online with the supervisor after the video demonstration and online teaching episodes had been completed and viewed by both the student teachers and the supervisors. And so that allowed for the ability to assess whether or not the students were actively reflecting on the decisions they made during their teaching. And then we also needed to assess classroom management. Now without traditional classroom teaching, assessing their ability to manage the classroom, especially the students behaviors and so on becomes quite difficult. And so we had to take the approach of using a video analysis where they were given videos of traditional classroom classroom settings to watch and they were to assess how it is that the particular teacher in the video would have approached the classroom management what were the strategies the teacher utilized assessing whether or not those were effective, ineffective what would they do differently and what recommendations they would make. So that was a way to allow them to think about classroom management and to demonstrate their understanding of the concept and how it is that they would approach that given the scenario that is presented in that video. So if you notice guys, we were not able to use one method to assess all four competences. We had to create different kinds of assessment aligned with the competences and try as best as was possible to ensure that they were as close to the real life situations that the practical skills require in their assessment. And that is how we ensured some amount of authenticity in the design. And this was a team effort by the way. Thanks so much for sharing. Next slide. And of course, this sounded all good on paper but there were some concerns and these are some of the concerns that were raised in relation to these three types of assessment tasks that were developed. And some of the concerns were have the course participants been trained in online teaching and learning? And then we also had to consider are the teachers sufficiently skilled to develop a video incorporating various technological tools? With the quality of the video presentation because some students might have better ICT skills than others, how will that affect the process of assessment? How many sessions will the students need in terms of being trained in using the different softwares? What would be the duration of these training sessions? What if the students don't have the requisite hardware and software to access the training and to do the videos that we asked them to do? And so these were some of those key concerns as we tried to navigate developing digital assessment for the practical errors. So guys, once we walk into that realm of coming into digital assessments for practical errors, these are some of the potential challenges that will be faced. And so we had to address these concerns. Next slide. So in the end, what did that process end up looking like that would allow us to address those concerns, ensure that the assessment was authentic and ensure that there was reliability and validity to those assessment tasks. And so we had to, of course, develop new guidelines and protocols for how it is that the students are expected to carry out each of these tasks. We had to adjust our rubrics. We had to send these modified assessment tasks for review and feedback, not just internally, but also across the campuses to ensure that what we are doing and the way we're assessing would be considered valid and reliable and would match or mirror the kinds of competencies and the ways and modalities of assessing and ensuring that kind of validity. We also had to, of course, secure approval from the Quality Assurance Committee in order for this to be instituted. And so guys, it, of course, was a lengthy, seems like a lengthy process, but it is also very important that when we develop these things, before we run with it and decide, okay, this sounds great. We need to go through these kinds of processes to ensure that what we're doing meets approved standards. And then on the other side in addressing the other concerns, we had to have meeting with the supervisors, meeting with students. We provided training and using ICT for the students and supervisors. This was a part that I played a key role in where we had to help the student teachers to learn how to develop video demonstrations and show that they had a clear understanding of what video demonstrations were about, how concept teaching comes into play and how is it that we utilize the tools in order to build those videos. We had to have those kinds of training sessions with both students and supervisors. We also had to prepare supplemental materials for the student teachers and their supervisors to support that process of building the videos, of understanding the concepts, of those tips they need to bear in mind as they develop to these different types of tasks. And we also had to assist the students, some of them needed assistance in obtaining the resources in order to actually develop the videos. Not everyone had access to computers and tablets and so on and so through our university's device loan program, many supervisors had to write those letters to ask for assistance and ensure that the students would be given those device loans in order to complete. So those are some of the things that we had to go through in that process of ensuring that there was equity in terms of helping the students to have that access, have the knowledge, be able to demonstrate those knowledge without the under similar, as close to similar conditions as were possible. Next slide. And so how did this go? The students had reflections, they were asked to write reflections on the different tasks. And this was one of the student teachers comment. She said, the demonstration teaching task is not efficient in my view. I was unable to provide feedback to students, visualize the completion of activities and evaluate and reflect on the student's understanding of the materials taught. Now, I believe that this was also a valid concern and this was her assessment of the digital assessment task. She didn't find it to be as useful as we were thinking it would be, she was not seeing it the way we saw it. Next slide. Although there were some negatives, I noted though that there were some student teachers who developed greater reflective critical thinking and reflective skills. So when they watched their videos, they were able to identify for themselves, what were some of their strengths and weaknesses, thinking about, okay, how could I make this better? When I go back into my classroom, what is it that I need to do differently? And so as you can see from this particular comment from the student teacher, she spoke about that after viewing her videos, I felt like I could have spoken more clearly, I could enunciate more. It almost seemed like I was mumbling when I spoke. So here you are seeing that videos can be very useful in allowing the student teacher to reflect on their own practices, to see themselves in action and to begin to recognize what it is that they could potentially do differently the next time around. And so that's one of those benefits that came out of the digital assessment task. And we also had, I thought that this was a good way of summing up how quite a few of the student teachers felt about it. This particular student teacher said that the COVID-19 pandemic came with an opportunity for potential teachers to exceed even their very own potential. It highlighted the true meaning of accountability, opportunity and adaptability. And I concur with her statement and her sentiments that indeed the COVID-19 pandemic created opportunities and forced us to go beyond our traditional ways of assessing and create new ways of thinking about our assessment practices. I hope you enjoyed our presentations. Thank you so much, guys, for joining and over to Miret. Thank you, Tashane. We are going to go straight into the question and answer session because we have quite a lot of questions that have come up. I'm trying to sort of pull them all together. And there seem to be a number of questions that relate to scalability. So I think we can start there. So we've had questions. Initially, these questions came in during Chantal's presentation, but I see they have continued to come in. And so really anybody could answer this. And the question is, how do we develop these assessments for large classes? And some people wanted to know from Chantal, can you indicate your class size and can you give people some insight, Chantal, into how it is you manage to read these numerous drafts, et cetera? So maybe you'd like to start with an answer, Chantal and Maggie and Tashane, please join in. Okay, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Great. For my classes, my class sizes never went beyond 30 students per class. And in order to ensure that I could, that each assignment would take time and thinking and I found that it made sense sometimes to have the students working in teams or in groups because the demands of the assignment would ask students to be approaching it from different perspectives and deep thinking would be required as well as they would have to develop some skills to from just say paper-based assessment to how do you put that into a digital space? How do you refine it for aesthetic appeal? So their assignments required many different aspects to them to finalize and to make them ready for submission. So I found with my students, it made sense to have them working more in teams or in groups to do the assignment. So if you have large classes, as many as maybe a hundred, then you'd have to sit down and think about how you can group for effectiveness. During the COVID pandemic, in the earliest part of it, some of my students, with students having to work online, I found that it wasn't okay to have them do self-grouping. Within a classroom space, you can say to students, okay, you self-group. But as the lecturer, I had to work out groups for students to make it easy for them to meet. I had to create spaces as well on Zoom or wherever students could meet. So as a teacher, you had to think about the challenges that students could likely come upon and see how you could help to minimize those challenges. But definitely look to the assignment, look to see the different prongs or areas or aspects of the assignment that would need to be covered for students to do their assignment well. And based on that note, you could decide how many persons you wanted working as a group or so on. So that's how I would suggest you deal with the whole business of large groups, scalability. All right? Thank you. So grouping is one idea. Maggie and Tashane, did you want to share any other idea because we're getting a lot of comments about the fact that so many classes, especially in our universities and especially sort of introductory courses are 100, 200, sometimes up to 300 students. Did either of you want to add anything to what Chantel has said apart from the grouping? Is there any other strategy that perhaps people could draw on? One of the things... Sorry, Tashane. I have to compare with Chantel that even for us and 300 for us is not a big class in our context. In our context, a big class is a class running fully online like contemporary social issues for an example, compulsory to all first years. And you would roughly have 8,000 students participating per semester and we've got two semesters in that course. And grouping has been the solution inside model for us as well in doing that and scaling it up. It even starts from when the faculty or the lecturer or academic member is engaging with the students. Even that already starts from the perspective of grouping them per facilitator and then having facilitators, even checking and evaluating one another as they are facilitating the learning of the different groups. They come up with a common plan, of course, in the beginning for the entire group and for the entire semester. And then they divide it into smaller chunks, almost bite-sized chunks within their respective groups when they are then administering the various activities. And I could add that besides grouping, I have learned over the three years that contemporary social issues is running fully online on Moodle is also the aspect of having a variety of activities and not just having, as we were used to, one sort of major assignment and one test and then maybe the major exam. But this particular course is packed with activities throughout the units, the learning outcomes, and then in terms of the actual assessments as well. So Tashane, you could come in as well with more examples. Thank you, Maggie. So I was actually on the same idea as you were mentioning. And so one of the things I was thinking about too is that within the units, rather than having those two major heavy assignments, you can also embed in there many assignments, many tasks that students also are allowed to peer review, do peer assessments as well. So assist the lecturer in terms of how it is that you navigate that space and handle the large numbers. And then you randomly take a sample from each of those peer review series of activities and you grade the quality of the kind of review and feedback they give to each other. So I think that that is also another strategy that can be very helpful doing peer review. And as the lecturer, you also do your random assessment of samples of the peer review for each unit. Thank you, Tashane. So we've gotten a couple of ideas there. And as you talk about the peer review, Tashane, one of the questions that came through, in fact, more than one question has come through with respect to rubrics. And the questions around rubrics are first of all, are the rubrics shared? And I think the answer to that would be pretty straightforward. But I thought an interesting question associated with that was, do the students self assess in line with the rubric? And I'm bringing this question to the three of you because there are a lot of questions coming through around cheating. People are very, very concerned about cheating. And I think that maybe you can answer this question about the rubrics and also perhaps answer the question about how we ensure that the work is actually being done by the students themselves. I'm sort of rolling two questions in one there. Sorry, but I'm watching the time. Who would like to take that one about rubrics and students self assessing in line with the rubrics? I can take the one with rubrics, Samiret. I find it's very useful to have rubrics from the get go because with the rubrics, the students know exactly what they're working towards. They know how it will be assessed and they can plan for the best possible performance in terms of competence and the grade that they're going to receive. So whenever you create your authentic assessment, a rubric must accompany the assessment. The other thing too, in terms of the creation of authentic assessment is that you are, and this will minimize cheating. You are looking at the context within which students have to operate. And that is why I said at the start that when you design authentic assessment, it can be very demanding for the lecturer, the teacher at the start, but as time progresses, you will find that the labor intensive nature reduces as well as the time you have something on which you're already building and tweaking to go forward. But when you design your assessment, you look at the context within which students operate, looking at the real-life situations that they have to operate within and you design the assessment around those. So when you do that kind of design, students are less likely to find a similar assignment out there on the internet for them to just pull down and to showcase and to submit that this is mine because you are working with real situations. And for me also, when I am teaching about particular theories in my classes, I look to see how the theories can be applied to the national context or even the regional context because my students also come from across the region. And so yes, this is what exists out there in other spaces, but now how do you localize it and make it real in this space? So I tend to spend some time thinking about my courses, thinking about the objectives, and then I allow my creativity to be stretched to see how I can get students to think within the parameter of the context and that way it minimizes cheating. I could maybe just briefly add that we can also flip the rubric from not just the faculty member or the lecturer in our context coming up with the rubric and its categories. And on top of that, its segments and portions of points. But that can also be flipped to the student. For the student to look at a particular assessment task and suggest the type of rubric. I've seen this working in practice with some faculty members demonstrating and trying that out. And even for us, as the people that are responsible for the LMS within our university, we look at enhancements of what to use and get students more engaged. Whether it's a rubric, whether it's the tagging in terms of your grading, commenting that you will do in Moodle, or whether it's a marking guide, experience, whatever the case may be. But I have also heard from one of our professors once that it is scary to know that students should peer assess them using a rubric. But this is the realities we are faced with now at the moment. And I would encourage our audience that it's trial and error all the time. There's no right and wrong in definite terms, cast in stone. What we should do is go to such events like today, bank on one another's experiences, try things out, fail if need be and learn through those. Thank you for that, Maggie. We are getting rather tight on time. And so we have a lot of other questions here. And I just wanna flag one of the questions, not necessarily for an answer, but just to sort of suggest that maybe these are areas we might have to have other webinars or the sessions because people are asking about, how do we do this under special circumstances, such as one person raised the matter of technical drawing? How do we have a practical exam or ask for practical assignments in that area? There was also a question about children aged four to seven. How do we manage assessment for those students and for special needs students? So lots of questions coming in, lots of areas of concern, but I think we're going to have to wrap up. Chantal, next slide please. We're going to have to wrap up. And I want in the wrapping up to just explain how we're going to move forward. We've had these three digital assessment workshops. We are hoping that we can in the next few weeks generate some guidelines and resources which we will share with you. We also hope that later on in the year we will have some online courses and you'll learn all about the availability of these through email. We will let you know, but I think an immediate concern has to do with badging and how is the badging going to work? And so I'm going to ask my colleague, Dr. David Porter to in the next three or four minutes just explain to you how the badging will work. So David, over to you. Thanks, Maret. You'll see the slide there. We are about to offer digital badging to all of the registered workshop participants. And the way it will work is that following all of our online workshops we sent out a link with the archive of the workshop that you can review or share. And along with the link to all of our registered participants will be a link to give you an opportunity to earn a digital badge. It will simply be a URL that you can hit to take part in a piece of authentic assessment. Next slide, please. The link that you will be supplied will give you the criteria, a rubric for the reflector badge on digital assessment. And what you need to do is review the criteria for earning the badge and click more at the bottom of the link you receive to read the entire set of criteria. Following that, you'll get an opportunity to enter your name and email address and take time to complete your badge submission providing your reflection statements in the text blocks provided. And like Maggie's digital integrity initiative at the University of Namibia we're going to ask you to also observe an honor code to certify that you've participated in the workshops or viewed the video recordings and that you've accepted the terms and conditions. And what will happen is that we will receive your submissions and we'll evaluate your submissions based on the criteria and the rubric and then award you a digital badge which will be sent to you as a web link where you can claim the badge and use the badge as a digital artifact that you can put onto your LinkedIn profile or other profiles. It will also give you the opportunity to print a PDF certificate of your badge as well so that if you want a paper certificate you can have that as well. It's the first time we've tried this little piece of authentic assessment and awarded a digital badge to go with it and I think you'll enjoy the experience and get a sense of how digital certification actually works. In our follow-up workshops that we are planning following up courses that we're planning we'll also be looking at integrating digital assessment and digital badging as a part of that process as well. So that's how it will work. You will get a link with the archive to the videos. You'll follow the link to the form, read the criteria for assessment, complete your submission and then submit it for evaluation. Thanks, Marat. Thank you for that, David. I see a couple of questions coming in from people about are there any deadlines associated with this? What if I only attended one of the workshops? If you attended just one workshop, that's fine. You will focus the task on that workshop that you attended. With respect to deadlines and so on all of the details will be there when you follow the link. You will be able to get all of your details and in addition, we do have contact information there. So if you have specific questions you can always reach out to us. So just some reminders in closing before I thank everybody. Keep an eye on your inbox. You're going to hear from us. There will be a short post workshop survey. We will be sending you the link to the YouTube recording. You will have a further link that will give you details about how to earn the badge and we will of course keep you abreast of announcements particularly in relation to the guidelines that we hope will be available and any upcoming courses. So at this point, last slide I would like to thank everybody for having participated. In particular, I want to thank our panelists today not just for their expertise in this area and their willingness to share but I think for their openness and their honesty and the fact that they chose real life examples from their own practice. And I can tell from the comments that people found that particularly useful. Of course, I want to close by thanking the persons in the background, David, Kirk and Keshin. Thank you all. Have a wonderful day or night wherever you are. And we look forward to engaging with you further in the future. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.