21 August 2013: eAssessment Scotland Session - Assessment-as-learning: introducing the Conversation Sim

Presenters: Robert Nelson and Phill Dawson (Monash University, Australia)

Hosted by Professor Geoffrey Crisp, Dean Learning and Teaching, RMIT University and Dr Mathew Hillier, Teaching and Educational Development Institute, University of Queensland, Australia starting 07:00AM UST/GMT. Duration 51 minutes.

This session tells the story of the conversation sim. We wanted to teach unwieldy, sprawling syllabus to hundreds of people whom we might never see; but we also wanted to assess if the students follow our ideas. Our model was the Socratic humanities tutorial, where a teacher asks a question and someone answers - partially and with bias - in a way that calls for further responses. We replicate this structure on the computer which simultaneously conducts assessment, because participation in the simulated conversation clocks up credit on a judiciously discriminating basis.

Acknowledgement: Australian Government, Office for Learning and Teaching, Seed Grant "Assessment as learning through conversation simulation".

Further information

• PowerPoint Slide Set: eAS_21_aug_2013.ppt
• Session chat log (text file): eAS_21_aug_2013_chat_log.txt
• OLT Project page: http://www.olt.gov.au/project-assessment-learning-through-conversation-simulation-2012
• Robert's profile page: http://opvclt.monash.edu.au/staff-profiles/robertn.html
• Conversation Sim website: http://conversationsim.org/
• Journal article: Nelson, R. & Dawson, P. (2013) "A contribution to the history of assessment: how a conversation simulator redeems Socratic method" Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Edcuation, 20 June: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.798394

You Tube version (Flash video)

A screen cast of the session.

Start playing via You Tube (note: this is a single file): http://youtu.be/SyF7V3b_afg

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