Authentic Assessment Ideas: Infographics

Effective communication of information in a visual form is around us in our daily life. However, infographics (information graphics) as assessment still seems to be an emerging application in our teaching and learning strategies. Infographics are one-page documents that present a concise overview of a complex topic in visually rich form using icons, images, graphics and data (Darcy, 2019). As one of the few media forms that transfer complex information easily in an eye-catching way, the infographic is used widely in our society, including the commercial sector. It supports cognitive processing, learning, and future recognition and recollection (Dunlap and Lowenthal, 2016), and can reduce understanding barriers due to the human brain's rapid visual processing (Otten et al., 2015). 

Accordingly, scholars suggest that graduates need to be able to interpret as well as create infographics in work environments (Toth, 2013). A well-designed infographic learning activity and assessment can encourage critical thinking and teach students to apply knowledge in an innovative and communicable form while also demonstrating digital literacy (Darcy, 2019; Dunlap and Lowenthal, 2016). But there are risks as well if the data or information is used inappropriately. Being a visually appealing medium, an infographic can influence its viewers more powerfully and induce greater trust in its information (Toth, 2013). As such, it is vital for teachers to guide students in creating infographics ethically. One suggestion is to use it in a group activity so that multiple members' input could reduce the possibility of inaccurately presented data (Otten et al., 2015). 

Educators in the Monash Business School have also started to apply infographics as new assessment forms. They have noticed that such assessments not only assess subject-related learning outcomes but also develop students' employability by imparting transferable skills. Associate Professor Srinivas Sridharan has designed and implemented a collaborative infographic assessment in his unit MKC3140 - Marketing strategy implementation since 2020. In the latest semester, students worked in teams for three weeks to research a real-world case and create an infographic to visually present their work. This authentic assessment simulated a scenario of students working in a marketing consultancy team with an Australian grocery retailer client. The student team would read supplied materials, discuss, research, compile their ideas, write, and create the infographic. Such innovative assessment design does not only assess the marketing-related higher-order learning outcomes, but it also provides a unique opportunity for students to practise their digital literacy and Monash Graduate Attributes in terms of critical thinking, creativity and communication.

Figure 1 Part of the Infographic Assessment Instruction

Considering that students might not be familiar with this type of assessment, Srinivas has prepared a detailed assignment instruction with visually presented information and a marking rubric for the students. The assessment was also introduced and discussed in the tutorials. He provided students with quite some flexibility in terms of the infographic format and that is a great practice to design assessments for academic integrity. The rubric assesses both content and visual storytelling. With such preparations, students were able to produce some really interesting infographics.

The students' feedback is very positive. They considered the assessment effective and help them to apply the knowledge. More importantly, the innovative assessment provides them with a unique opportunity to challenge their way of thinking that is built by the traditional marketing assignment. By engaging students in such innovative assessments, we hope that the students learn to critically engage with information, develop essential lifelong learning skills, and get ready for the evolving future.

And in future teaching, we can also look at how the business industry creates and uses infographics. A lot of those infographics (e.g. Infographic - Bringing the farm to school) are very visual and contain less text compared to the student assignments. Education design work can improve the assessment activity and make it more authentic.

Words from the CE: Associate Professor Srinivas Sridharan 

In today’s fast-paced workplaces, managers want their teams to produce short and sharp documents that convey the essence of a complex issue and yet look comprehensive in their coverage. In particular, the infographic has emerged as a powerful presentation tool. It is also a powerful marketing tool for firms. Marketing emails and blogs whose content contains infographics are shown to generate more links back to a firm’s website than content without infographics (sometimes 90-100% more). Thus, for business students, building infographics can confer hands-on experience in developing a critical digital design type of skill while simultaneously assessing for the core subject matter. And they are more engaged too!

What is your experience?

What have you experienced in trying new ideas of assessments such as infographics? What worked and what did not? Please leave a reply or share your story with us.

Enhancing teaching team's communication at Econometrics and Business Statistics

I had the pleasure of being a part of the department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS)'s retreat earlier this month in the beautiful Red Hill. It was the first one after almost two years of uncertainty and radical changes due to the pandemic, and it was fantastic to see colleagues excitedly catching up and bonding over shared experiences. In the spirit of wrapping up and reflecting on 2021, I facilitated a session titled "Enhancing communication within teaching teams" which saw EBS colleagues engage in buzzing discussions and share great ideas. 

To offer some contexts for the session, let's turn back time to the beginning of 2021. Charanjit Kaur and I have been working on developing an Education Training Pathway that focuses on long-term and structured teaching development for tutors at EBS. 

EBS's Education Training Pathway

In undertaking this project, we conducted a series of discussions with tutors to better understand their needs for teaching development, and found that the theme of communication within teaching teams kept surfacing. As a result, we sent out a survey from the department's tutors to gather more feedback and suggestions for their team's communication. Below are some of the most commonly proposed ideas from survey responses:

More regular updates and meetings among teaching team members

Information related to weekly teaching to be communicated clearly and far in advance to tutors

Collect and discuss feedback for the unit from teaching team and students

Expectations, plans and changes to be communicated to head tutor in advance

Utilise online communication platforms (Slack, Whatsapp, MS Teams, Moodle forums)

More opportunities for team learning to share experience and exchange ideas

We also had the chance to hear from Ari Handayani and Julie Cook, two very seasoned Head Tutors in the department, about how they communicate with Chief Examiners and other tutors in their teams. 

Ari Handayani, an experienced Head Tutor, sharing her team's approaches to communication

And finally, colleagues in the room and those attending online had some time to join a group to discuss what had been presented, as well as to reflect on what they can take away. It was a pleasure to see many lively conversations, many ideas exchanged, and much food for thought. And I hope that the session served as a reminder for everyone to slow down, look back and think forward about how 2022 can be another year of improvements and innovations.

Tool Tips: Hidden feature of Moodle marking guide

Feedback is integral to student learning and development, yet it is among the most neglected when it comes to assessment marking. And this could be due to reasons such as large number of submissions,  laborious processes of marking, or it simply gets old by the 100th essay! 

If this resonates with you, here is a great feature of the Moodle marking guide that can help you save time while providing meaningful feedback to students. The frequently used comments. 

While setting up your marking guide for assignments in Moodle, you can also create a bank of frequently used comments. These comments serve as templates that can be easily inserted into the feedback comment fields and edited during marking. This can save you from repeatedly typing similar feedback for hundreds of students, keep marking contained in Moodle, and provide all students an equal level of details in their feedback. 

Here is a video demonstration for implementing this in Moodle. 

Give this a go for your next assignment, and don't hesitate to reach out to your Ed designer for support. 

Improving Moodle: Strategies with Links & Resources

This is a new series, dedicated to how educators can improve their Moodle sites.

When it comes to getting student's to click on things (sometimes referred to as 'engagement') it can often be a hard sell. The structure and the layout of a Moodle site plays a factor, but more importantly is how that link is being sold to the student.

Checkout the below video from the NNGroup (Nielsen-Norman, user experience specialists) to find out some principles to consider when linking to content.

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Growing Social Presence in Online Courses

by Andrew Moshirnia, Department of Business Law and Taxation

The need to establish rapport in a classroom is paramount. The class-as-unit is a social organism, to be tended and maintained, with the goal that instruction may be enriched with responsive learners and innovative peers. But in this environment, how can we cultivate social presence without the benefit of physical presence? We already use discussion fora and other technologies to create opportunities for interaction, but here are five additional ways to grow social presence and hopefully make your units less anonymous and your Zoom calls less barren.

 

1. Stressing (and re-stressing) the Importance of Turning on Webcams (and addressing the legitimate concerns of students who do not wish to do so)

The number one concern that I field is that students are refusing to turn on their webcams. I take this head on, by devoting time in my first class to walk through four different motivations for turning on webcams: Etiquette, Business Skill, Student Satisfaction, and Personal Appeal. I also do a quick training on how to turn on a virtual background. I return to this topic frequently, usually at the start of every class, and results have been good. I also tailor webcam policy to increase the comfort of students who are willing to turn on webcams when speaking, but often are reluctant to leave cameras on throughout the lesson.

 

2. Pre-class Inventory

You can begin building a social connection before the unit starts (or alternatively in the very first week of the unit) by using a pre-class interest inventory. By email or the unit Moodle, you can query students in ways to create meaningful connections. Below is one that I use:

• How does this unit fit in with your course of study? (If you are coming from a technical field that taught you system analysis as part of system or product design, please let me know here).
• What is the best thing you remember learning about last year?
• How do you learn best? What have teachers and professors done in the past that helped you to learn?
• If you are reluctant to turn on your webcam during class, what adjustments can I make to encourage you to turn it on?
• Please tell me anything else you think I should know about you (for example, preferred pronoun or title, specific learning need, area you want to improve, etc.)  

3. Creating Quasi-interactive Lectures

As many instructors are using pre-recorded lectures, it is important to sprinkle quasi-interactive moments in those recordings. Recording short welcome- and exit-videos provides this opportunity. In my welcome videos, I respond to student queries (creating a sort of call-in show vibe) and share a little story or fact that is on my mind (for example, wishing my students a happy Nowruz). Exit-videos are also helpful in summarising the lesson and setting up interest in the coming lesson.

4. Check-in / Mid-SETU

We have no doubt encountered SETU comments at the end of the year that we lament: “You should have told me that during the semester!” Thankfully, there is a easy cure: we do not need to wait for official SETU’s to ask SETU-type questions. I do a mid-sem SETU and make adjustments accordingly. Students are often delighted that a stray comment from them motivates a change.

5. Ice-breaker / Sponge Activities

During synchronous activities, It can be helpful to prime students to respond and also to give them a motivation to be on-time. I often ask students a random question for mass response in text: what’s your favourite dessert, type in your favourite movie quote, etc. This recruits attention and also creates a learning moment for how to use communication tools.

A New Journey: Hybrid Concurrent Teaching

Since S1 2021, a relatively new teaching mode has been introduced in Monashto to cope with the new scenario of the pandemic. In those classes, some students attend a workshop in a physical classroom while others attend via video conferencing (eg Zoom) at the same time. Teachers have to deliver synchronous learning occurring at the same time for both on-campus and remote participants, known as Hybrid Concurrent Teaching.

In this new model, every student is able to have the same opportunity to receive identical information from their teachers in real-time, discuss with their peers and teachers, and complete in-class learning activities synchronously.

This new mode allows all students to connect with their educators and peers at the same time. With the hybrid model, every student is able to get the same information presented by the educator at the same time. Students are all given the same opportunity to participate in class discussions and to participate in online-class activities synchronously. 

Despite its benefits, it also presents some new challenges to our teachers who most likely have never done that before. I know that I have never done that before! What should we do? MEA has prepared some interactive teaching scenario demonstrations on their website. And I am also preparing myself for working with such a unit in the coming semester.

Design and preparation

Other than the general principles for designing an engaging unit, some special considerations can be given to the following items:

• Prepare a detailed session plan. Here are some examples from MEA:
• Team project lesson plan
• Tutorial lesson plan
• Workshop lesson plan
• And when you present those plans to the students, you can simplify them and make them more visually appealing for the students.
• Design how students in each cohort will ask questions and how both the question and answer will be communicated with other students if necessary.
• Plan simple learning activities before advancing to the complex ones
• Consider pre-recording most of the contents for students to view before the face-to-face sessions.
• Plan extra time for:
• Technical preparation
• Time to socialise: ice-breaker, fun activities ...
• Multiple mini-breaks

Teaching activities in the classroom

After attending MEA's hybrid teaching technical training session in the classroom that has a presenter camera with Zoom enabled, I have a better understanding of the technical requirements of the class (e.g. it is very important for all students to bring their own laptops and headsets) and which teaching activities might be suitable for the scenario.

• Easy ones:
• Demonstration
• Polling
• Quizzes
• Presentations
• Not so easy ones:
• Group discussion
• Collaborative whiteboard activities
• Students to create resources
• Group projects

MEA has prepared some questions to consider when you design those learning activities.

To mix or not to mix?

But the ultimate question for hybrid concurrent teaching might be: whether I should mix the on-site and online students in groups? Well, I have asked the same question to myself. 

Of course, you want to provide an equal learning experience for online and face-to-face students. In addition to asking everyone to join Zoom with the camera on and a headset, you want to mix them in groups in group activities. However, MEA strongly suggests we not do that. They even write that in BOLD in their guide. That is to avoid technical issues such as audio feedback.

I have not done such a test with everyone joining Zoom with a headset in one room. I guess things can get messy in a classroom with students' laptops, your mic, and the classroom speakers. Maybe it is better not to try mixing the face-to-face and online students and follow the MEA guide.

What is your experience?

What have you experienced in your hybrid concurrent teaching? What worked and what did not? What you are going to change in your teaching? Please leave a reply or share your story with us.

Example of excellence - Role-play in Accounting

In 2019, I had the pleasure of observing a very engaging and authentic form of assessment in Damien Lambert's class: role play based on storyboards of auditing scenarios that students have created. 

In this assignment, students are to demonstrate their understanding of the processes and activities involved in the planning, performance and conclusion of a financial report audit through the creation of a hypothetical scenario. The assignment also aimed to help students develop key skills and attributes of a effective auditor, according to a survey by Forbes and KPMG (2015):

This assessment format has been implemented in many Auditing and Assurance units, not only at Monash campuses but also in a graduate audit unit at San Francisco State University. With its four-year history and counting, this assessment has become a remarkable tradition. 

This year, I caught up with Damien, Ashna Prasad and Lisa Powell to learn more about how they have managed to successfully facilitate role play when students are not physically in the room. The answer is, unsurprisingly, technology. More specifically, empowering students to showcase their creativity through the use of technology. 

Which aspects of assessment design have stayed the same? 

• Students are in groups of 4-5 members
• Provision of written instructions
• Detailed marking guide for storyboard (group) and role play (individual and group evaluation)
• Group activities to help students connect with group members and build rapport
• Role-play/presentation tips videos created in collaboration with Monash Centre of Theatre and Performance
• Visual illustrations and visual performance art workshop run by a professional artist

What's new?

• Hybrid cohort: some groups met face-to-face, and some worked completely online
• Format of the role play performance: video submission, instead of live performance
• Instructional videos for the assessments and other resources
• Sample storyboard to demonstrate exemplars
• Feedback Fruits used to facilitate peer evaluation
• Students experienced less stress and anxiety of role-playing live, while showing more creativity through the creative process of making videos. 

Show time!

Here are some highlights from student performances. Enjoy!

These snippets of student role play are a testament to the power of students' creativity when they are given the space, guidance and autonomy to express it. The team and other colleagues have also written a paper about their teaching practice, and highlighted "enhanced creativity and human skills", as well as "high levels of engagement, motivation, and enthusiasm" among students. 

"Creativity in intelligence having fun." 

Albert Einstein

It goes without saying that contextualised and creative forms of assessment bring about challenges in terms of time, resources and student reception. Upon reflection, the team shared about a small minority of students who struggled with the lack of structure and ambiguity from the revised assessment format (Powell et al., 2015). Improvements such as more visual aids, video demonstrations and scaffolding towards dealing with ambiguous situations and uncertainties are in store for future student cohorts. 

How have you innovated to transform your teaching for a hybrid or online environment? We'd love to hear about your experience in the comments below.