This document summarizes a presentation on using Web 2.0 tools for assessment in higher education. It outlines the possibilities of Web 2.0, such as open publishing and collaboration, but also challenges, such as developing assessment criteria for new media and increased marking workload. It then describes a research project that investigated current practices and developed guidelines for using Web 2.0 for assessment and ensuring academic integrity.

1. Web 2.0 as a new assessment option: What are the
possibilities and what are the challenges?
Rosemary Clerehan and Judy Sheard
Monash University
Higher Education IT Summit
25-26 October 2010

2. Outline of presentation
1. Web 2.0 in higher education
2. Affordances of Web 2.0 – what are the possibilities?
3. Our research project – Web 2.0: new directions for
assessment and academic integrity
4. Where, how, why is Web 2.0 used in higher education?
5. Using Web 2.0 in assessment – what are the
challenges?
2

3. Why and how might we want our students to use the
social web to demonstrate their learning?

4. Affordances of Web 2.0 for learning, teaching &
assessment?
O’Reilly & Battelle “One of the fundamental ideas underlying
(2009, p. 2) Web 2.0 [is] that successful network
applications are systems for harnessing
collective intelligence ... a large group of
O’Reilly, T., & Battelle, J. (2009). Web
Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On.
people can create a collective work
Special Report for the Web 2.0
Summit, 20-22 October , San Francisco
whose value far exceeds that provided
CA.
http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/2
by any of the individual participants”
8/web2009_websquared-
whitepaper.pdf

5. Affordances of Web 2.0:
What are the possibilities?
• Open publishing
• Communication styles and texts
• Personal identity and experience
• Co-creation, collaboration, crowdsourcing
• Content management

6. Open publishing
• Student work can be made easily
accessible to an audience of
peers for mutual benefit including
reviewing and rating.
• Review and assessment of
student work from outside the
university can be invited or
anticipated.

7. Communication styles and texts
• Web 2.0 assignments can involve
frequent short pieces of work
employing conversational language
and combining audio, video,
images & text.
• Feedback can be exchanged
rapidly, using rating or ranking
systems, informal rejoinders,
audio, video, images, icons.

8. Personal identity and experience
• Students’ online identity can be
different from the student who is
recognisable in class.
• Students’ social or cultural
experiences of web authoring can
influence the work they produce
for assessment.
• Reflection and self-reflection
about the idea of identity are
prompted by the need to create
and express an online identity.

9. Co-creation, collaboration, crowdsourcing
• Group work can scale between a
small closed group and a large
free-to-join learning community
• Individual contributions to group
work can (sometimes) be
distinguished.
• Groups can work on large,
complex tasks.

10. Content management
• Students’ assessable work may
consist of remixing web content
from diverse sources.
• Students’ assessable work may be
posted on several host sites.
Work posted on one site may be
syndicated by others and tracked
back.
• Students can control the content
they produce for assessment in
accordance with terms of service,
end user agreements or other
governance policies of host sites.

11. Where, how, why is Web 2.0 used in
higher education? An ALTC project
investigation
Web 2.0 authoring tools in higher education
learning and teaching: new directions for
assessment and academic integrity.

12. Project aims
• Investigation of Web 2.0 experiences of
academics – with focus on assessment and
academic integrity.
• Development of good practice guidelines
for use of web 2.0 in higher education.

13. Project team
Jenny Waycott (project manager), Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health
Sciences, University of Melbourne.
Celia Thompson, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne.
Margaret Hamilton, School of Computer Science and IT, RMIT University.
Joan Richardson, School of Business Information Technology, RMIT University.
Kathleen Gray (project leader), Faculty of Medicine / Department of Information
Systems, University of Melbourne.
Rosemary Clerehan, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash
University.
Judithe Sheard, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University.

14. Project stages
• Survey of academics using Web 2.0 in their
teaching – an overview of the use of Web 2.0.
• Interviews of academics using Web 2.0 - exploring
issues around assessment and academic integrity.
• Pilot projects – field testing ideas for good practice
guidelines.
• Development and dissemination of good practice
guidelines and resources.

15. Project stages
• Survey of academics using Web 2.0 in their
teaching – an overview of the use of Web 2.0.
• Interviews of academics using Web 2.0 - exploring
issues around assessment and academic integrity.
• Pilot projects – field testing ideas for good practice
guidelines.
• Development and dissemination of good practice
guidelines and resources.

16. Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: Where
Survey responses from Australian academics using Web 2.0 for
assessment of student learning that is summative (and not
formative).
Field of Study Number of respondents
Humanities / Society & Culture 16
15
Education
Information Technology 11
9
Medicine & Health
6
Management & Commerce
Other 3

17. Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: Where
Number of students Number of responses
enrolled in subject
Less than 50 21
50-100 10
101-200 9
More than 200 7
69% undergraduate and 31% postgraduate subjects

18. Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: How
Type of Web 2.0 activity Number of responses
Wiki writing 32
Blogging/microblogging 31
Social networking 17
Audio/video podcasting 16
Virtual world activities 12
Social bookmarking 11

19. Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: How
How much the assignment is Number of responses
worth
01-10% 7
11-20% 11
21-30% 9
31-40% 6
41-50% 9
51-60% 2
61-70% 0
71-80% 3
81-90% 2
91-100% 4

20. Current Web 2.0 assessment practices: Why
Intended learning outcomes Number of
responses
Generic or graduate skills or attributes 35
Specialised knowledge or skills required in a
29
discipline or profession
Foundation knowledge or skills preparatory to
28
a discipline or profession

21. And what about assessment?
• Assessment is very traditional
– marks, comments, using rubrics
• Not much evidence of creative or new
assessment, e.g.
– peer assessment
– self assessment
– online assessment
– automatic assessment

22. Using Web 2.0 for assessment: What are
the challenges?
• Students working in the new media
– Student autonomy vs. structure and guidance
– Developing voice and identity
– Collaborating with other students
• Appropriate assessment criteria for Web 2.0
– Assessing co-created content
• Implementation and management
• Increase in marking workload
What is an appropriate fit between what assessment is
trying to achieve and what Web 2.0 can do?

23. Students working in the new media
Student autonomy vs. structure and guidance
“... the bottom third of the class had difficulty thinking
about what to post on when it was left completely
up to them. .... it’s that eternal teaching struggle,
how much guidance you give, if you give too much
guidance are you constraining the best students, if
you don’t give enough guidance you’re leaving the
weaker students to flounder. So it’s trying to find
some midpoint there.”

24. Students working in the new media
Developing voice and identity
“There’s a process that goes into *students+ finding their
different voices, how to share appropriately, how to write
with authority. So it’s trying to find some midpoint there. “
Collaborating with other students
“... students found it challenging to co-create content and
collaborate with other students.” - learning to become a co-
author

25. Appropriate assessment criteria for
Web 2.0 tasks
“The assessor is not assessing a written document, they’re
assessing a page which ... is a whole labyrinth of choices and
connections, so they’ve got to actually work their way through
... decision paths and decision tree and things like that.”
“*Students+ are producing very different things, so I suppose the
criteria need to capture that in some way”
The different style of writing in a Web 2.0 assignment made
marking more difficult “because the content does not have to
be of an academic standard it can be hard (to) assess, e.g.
marking sloppy/lazy prose.”

26. Assessing co-created content
“How do you mark assignments when students can
change/overwrite each other’s work! Many students
who contributed early, found that their work was
completely lost. How do you manage this process of
overwriting and still contributing to the same
content?”

27. Implementation and management
“ *There is a lot of+ work involved in setting up *the blog
assignment] and making sure all the students know
how to do it. If you ask them to write an essay they
just go off and write it, you don’t have to spend the
first three weeks of the course teaching them about
essays.”
“since a lot of the students had no experience with this
as an assessment task they needed ... feedback on
what’s working, what’s not working, how they can
improve, how they can build.”

28. Increase in marking workload
“Last year I had them doing a blog every week … the
marking was killing me because you’ve got to mark
them and get them back in a week. And then you’ve
got four or five classes, that’s six or seven hours work
a week in marking. And then you’ve got assignments
and exams.”

29. ... and then there is Web 3.0
October 2009 29

30. References
Gray, K., Thompson, C., Clerehan, R., Sheard, J., & Hamilton, M. (2008). Web
2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity.
The Internet and Higher Education, 11(2), 112-118.
Gray, K., Thompson, C., Sheard, J., Clerehan, R., & Hamilton, M. (2010).
Students as web 2.0 authors: Implications for assessment design and
conduct. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(1), 105-122.
Webinar: www.transformingassessment.com/events_26_may_2010.php
Workshops 2010-11 @ HERDSA, ATN Assessment, ASCILITE, ACE

31. Acknowledgements
Project Advisory Group
• Matthew Allen, Bill Anderson, Greg Battye, Robyn Benson, Tracey Bretag, Jenny Buckworth,
Denise Chalmers, Geoffrey Crisp, Leitha Delves, Bobby Elliott, Jacqui Ewart, Glenn Finger, Tom
Franklin, Merrilyn Goos, Scott Grant, Ashley Holmes, Christopher Hughes, David Jones, Marj
Kibby, Adrian Kirkwood, Mark Lee, Catherine McLoughlin, Beverley Oliver, Kaz Ross, Alison
Ruth, Royce Sadler, Mary Simpson, Arthur Winzenried, Katina Zammit, Lynette Zeeng.
Project Reference Group
• Michael Abulencia, Robyn Benson, John Benwell, Marsha Berry, Marilys Guillemin, Laura
Harris, Deborah Jones, Gregor Kennedy, Shaun Khoo, George Kotsanas, Lauren O’Dwyer,
Jason Patten, Emma Read, Julianne Reid, Gordon Sanson, Cristina Varsavsky.
Project Pilot-testing Group
• Matthew Absolom, Anne Davies, Cathy Farrell, Scott Grant, Terry Hallahan, Michael
Henderson, John Hurst, Ramon Lobato, Warren McKeown, Michael Nott, Kerry Pantzopoulos,
Michele Ruyters, Michael Smith, Sandra Smith, Robyn Spence-Brown, Elizabeth Stewart, John
Terrell, Jenny Weight, Lynette Zeeng
ALTC Support for this project has been provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching
Council Ltd. (www.altc.edu.au), an initiative of the Australian Government Department of
Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed in this presentation
do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, or the
views of individual contributors apart from the project team.