Kerry Earl

Student Views on Short-Text Assignment Formats in Fully Online Courses.

Tertiary educators (and their institutions) are turning to technology to help meet increased demands in a changing environment. Assessment is one area where such moves are being made. This paper reminds us that assessment is more than a summative check on student knowledge and skills, it is an experience and part of the communication, and therefore relationship, between teachers and students. Student experience of assessment impacts on student perceptions of themselves, teacher and course quality. Having previously proposed the benefits of short-text formats for assignment tasks for teachers, this paper reports on a case study of student perceptions of these forms of assessment. Student responses were gathered using an online survey after a 12-week fully online undergraduate course. Findings suggest short-text assignments are rated highly by students not because of a shorter word count but because students appreciated the variety and creativity aspects to these assignments.

Auto-, duo- and collaborative-ethnographies: “caring” in an audit culture climate

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies. Design/methodology/approach – The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture. Findings – The authors then discuss major tenets of and make the case for the use of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies as caring practices and research method(ologies) that may in fact push back against such hegemonic neoliberal practices in the academy. Finally, the authors link these caring types of ethnographies to the papers within this special issue. Originality/value – This is an original look at the concepts of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies with relation to caring practices.

Being “in” assessment: the ontological layer(ing) of assessment practice

Purpose – Current discourses on educational assessment focus on the priority of learning. While this intent is invariably played out in classroom practice, a consideration of the ontological nature of assessment practice opens understandings which show the experiential nature of “being in assessment”. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Using interpretive and hermeneutic analyses within a phenomenological inquiry, experiential accounts of the nature of assessment are worked for their emergent and ontological themes. Findings – These stories show the ontological nature of assessment as a matter of being in assessment in an embodied and holistic way. Originality/value – Importantly, the nature of a teachers way-of-being matters to assessment practices. Implications exist for teacher educators and teacher education programmes in relation to the priority of experiential stories for understanding assessment practice, the need for re-balancing a concern for profe...