Wish I had more time to engage with all the recommended #ocTEL resources

So far in #ocTEL 2014, I have (time) limited myself to the weekly Webinars and 'If I only do one thing...' activities, and reflecting on them in my blog - this blog.

I sincerely wish I had more time to engage with all activities, but especially to engage with all the weekly recommended resources/references.

Today, while I was washing dishes and doing other household chores, I carted my laptop around with me, up and down stairs, lid open and playing MP3 recording of Week 4 recommended 2007 ALT keynote speaker:

• Dylan Wiliam, Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control, https://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/index.html 

The context was UK primary ed with primarily math and physics examples. However, the detail and advice on pedagogy and about using formative assessment to check learning and responsive teaching on what you find out they do/don't know, was invigorating for all education sectors. Well, it was invigorating for me. It isn't necessarily new detail for a 2014 audience, but it is well packaged and grounding, and why aren't we doing more of it? Why isn't responsive teaching based on formative assessment ubiquitous now?

I'm sure we can all think of examples of where this is occurring in tertiary education with some effectiveness, from conference presentations we attend and from practices within our own universities. Right now I'm thinking of a few examples from within my own uni in the table below.

Discipline area	Formative assessment	Responsive teaching
Statistics	Use classroom personal response systems to gauge student knowledge. Questions based on real world, layman type scenarios from a statistical angle.	Short discussion and debrief through to halting and unpacking ideas as a class, depending on responses.
Chiropractic^	Use online media annotation tool to analyse a videoed case study of a patient-practitioner clinical episode (acted). Arrive at a short list of potential diagnoses, individually, then collaboratively within a peer group.	A ‘Feedback Lecture’ (tutorial-like) addition to schedule when teachers noted some implausible diagnoses in some short lists. Students actively participated in the clinical thinking process as guided in class to increase understanding and decide whether to refine short lists before building on next stage of the case.
Computer Science	Use flipped classroom model where tutorial is focused on demonstrating consolidation and deepening of information engaged with prior class, based on problem scenarios.	The tutorial direction is largely dictated by the areas of understanding needing most development in order to tackle solving the set problem.
Psychology	Use an inter-teaching model where the students fill in a ‘feedback form’ at the end of each class, including awareness of strengths and weakness in own learning.	Teacher analyses feedback and creates podcasts for areas of most need for students to access before the next class. Thus those who feel they have the knowledge are not slowed down in next class, but tailored detail available to aid any catch-up.

^The chiropractic case is written up in:

• Colasante, M., Kimpton, A. & Hallam, J. (2014) A curriculum model to promote (chiropractic) critical thinking with video-case annotation. In M. Gosper and D. Ifenthaler (eds.), Curriculum models for the 21st century: Using Learning Technologies in Higher Education, Springer Science+Business Media : New York

Last word

I recommend watching or listening to Dylan Wiliam's address in the interest of assessing where we are with formative assessment, and where to next.