Course Assessments

As is the current practice, there will be individual assignments in all courses. However, individual assignments will be standardised to a weighting of 60% of the final grade. Individual assignments can take many formats. A few recommendations include:

More Automated Activities

At present, Course Instructors, E-tutors and Group Facilitators, usually have the task of marking scripts among other duties. For classes where the student number is very large, this often poses a challenge resulting in marksheets being submitted late. Furthermore, the activity of script marking is very resource intensive requiring the employ of numerous facilitators. If selected course assignments are converted to automated quizzes, this can alleviate a few of the challenges cited.

Moodle features can be employed to randomise questions from a bank of questions; thus, students may be presented with different versions of a quiz (if necessary) which assesses the same objectives. This is favourable since it promotes more personalised learning and assessment. Constructive feedback will be given to students and questions will be marked automatically by the software, providing students with immediate feedback, thus removing the dependence on e-tutors to mark numerous assignments.

One Asynchronous Reflective Activity

• An asynchronous reflective activity may take various forms. For example, it may be a graded discussion, blog, vlog or reflective journal. 

• At present, many of the reflective activities include graded and ungraded discussions.

• Often, these discussions span the entire duration of the delivery period. Both teachers and students have indicated that the large number and frequency of graded discussions is very onerous in terms of meaningful participation and very burdensome in terms of grading lengthy discussion threads each week.

• It is being proposed that there be only one graded asynchronous reflective activity.

One of the main attributes of the UWI graduate is to possess good interpersonal skills and to be able to collaborate and communicate effectively within groups. Group work forms a major part of our current assessment plan but is not included in all courses.

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Group Assignments in Every Course and Revised Group Assignment Weighting:

It is being proposed that a group work assignment be included in all courses. This will also help minimise the number of assignments to be marked and so the number of Markers to be employed. Furthermore, students have indicated that in some cases, these group activities / projects are weighted too heavily. Since students want their individual efforts to account for most of their course marks, it is being proposed that the weighting of group assignments be standardised and should constitute 40% of the overall course grade.