COVID-19: Unleashed your creativity_Part 10 (Evaluating my students’ assignment)

There are variety of assessments that I give to my students.  I always improvise the instructions from time to time based on my own evaluation of my teaching of previous semester and feedback given by previous students.  So, this time around since my students can no longer conduct physical face to face presentation due to the MCO, I need to improvise the way they do the presentation.  I discuss my predicament with one of my colleagues who is a techno savvy person and she teaches courses on multimedia in education.  She gives examples of her own class.  It gives me an idea on how to improvise my assignment.

Another colleague suggests that I should look at my rubric when improvising.  Do I need to change the rubric or can I still use the same rubric to evaluate?  If I change the rubric, I might jeopardise the course learning outcome as I might evaluate students differently because the mode of their report presentation (traditional mode – written and PPT presentation VS video mode).  I look at the rubric.  Alhamdulillah it does not state anything about the mode of presentation in specific but rather the content and clarity of the presentation of the content.  In both modes of reporting, the students need to present orally (and for those who opt for video mode, actually they have to prepare a script – written report in which in this case they don’t have to submit.  I can see that some of them were looking down a few times during recording).

So, even if students opt for the first option (traditional mode), they can still get high marks if they are able to present their idea clearly and the content is accurate.   Likewise, if students opt for the second option (video mode), they might get low marks if they are not able to present clearly and there are misconception in the content of their presentation.  In this case, I am using the same rubric to evaluate both mode of reporting.

So what are the criteria of my rubric?  It is based on the programme learning outcome that I want to address for this particular course.

For the communication skills, I divide the criteria into verbal and non-verbal parts.  The verbal parts include enthusiasm, elocution and such, whereas the non-verbal parts include poise, fluidity and so forth.  Poise can be detected from audio recording (from the tone of voice – the way student speaks whether it is in a hurry, relaxed mode and such).   There is also criteria which relates to cognitive aspect such as organisation of information, creativity and subject knowledge.

In short, the criteria in a rubric that I have prepared and given to the students is still the same even though the mode of presentation of the report has changed: written or non-written versions.  Alhamdulillah with the unchanged criteria, students are not confused with the expectations of the quality of the assignment that I gave to them.