Studio-style critiques

Studio models of teaching are based off the ideas of design and architecture studios. Students, or groups of students, work on realistic creative projects, and there are several different projects going on in the class at any one time. Periodically, students are asked present their work in progess, and other students are asked to offer their critiques and advice. In this way, students get to see a broader set of projects than just their own, and share and learn from each others' experiences in the class.

Assessory tries to support this for distance education and large(ish) classes by helping run the process online.

When we've run critiques in classes, we've found every class and every teacher wants to do them slightly differently. For example whether the first step is uploading a video, a portfolio to link, or just a presentation in class. And whether the critiques are text, video, or forms. Whether the critiques are allocated ahead of time so students know which presentations to pay attention to in large classes, or dynamically so that students who submit their presentation videos late can still get some reviews. So we're building the system around a fairly flexible task model.

Example: UQ DECO2800

UQ's DECO2800 is a software development studio course with a fairly large class (approx 200 students). Let's describe the 2015 version -

The students work in groups on features for a shared project. There are four tutorial classes, each with around 50 students and around twelve groups. Periodically through the term, the groups are asked to present their progress.

These used a two-stage critique:

  1. Each student in the tutorial is allocated (ahead of time) three groups to critique. The critiques were text
  2. Each group is asked to review their critiques -- read them and mark them against a simple form, as well as saying how they plan to use the advice.

Example: UNE COSC220

UNE has a similar software studio, except it runs online, and the critiques are done via video.

  1. each project group submits a video of their work so far
  2. each student in the same tutorial session is allocated three videos to critique from the ones submitted so far. The critiques are also recorded as videos.
  3. each student (individually) is asked to watch back their critiques of their group and mark whether they were objective & helpful.

Getting the data out

Assessory gives you the data as a simple csv so you can open it in your favourite spreadsheet. For example a reverse critique (a simple form where Aice marks whether Bob's critique was objective, useful, helpful, etc, might come out as:

Alice Student, alice@student.example, Bob Pupil, bob@student.example, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE,"Bob's advice was great; I'm planning on using the design he suggested for a magufffin widget"

Entries where a student has opened the form but not submitted it will appear as blank rows:

Alice Student, alice@student.example, Bob Pupil, bob@student.example, , , , , ,

Entries where the student has never even opened the form will be missing. So if a student has fewer entries than you asked them to complete, that means they never even opened the form for those critiques.

Getting videos out

Videos appear as their links in the spreadsheet. We use youtube-dl to download them for safekeeping. In a later release, we'll build that in as a service.

Why not store the videos in Assessory itself? Lots of students record the videos on their smartphones. This means that for them, the easiest way to submit a video is to share it via the sharing options that are already in their phone's gallery app, and post in the link. Rather than us giving them yet another blasted app to install just so they can compress and submit videos for that one course they're doing this term...

We do recognise that universities will want students to be able to submit videos to university servers instead of the public cloud, but we're guessing that is more likely to be through Kaltura or some other specialised video hosting service.

We'd love to hear how you would like video submission to work for your course...