Challenge

The advantages and challenges of designing a course curriculum to embed employability and include innovative authentic assessment within a multi-disciplinary, practice-based, post graduate course offered in the MHRM program. Providing post graduate students with an opportunity to connect their classroom learning, with workplace relevance is at the core of this discussion.

Approach

In designing the authentic assessments, it was key that the three pieces of major assessments in this course built on each other and were accordingly scaffolded with authentic learning. The crux of this approach is supported by Guilkers, Bastiaens & Kirschner (2006, p.339) to foster authentic learning and to improve student achievement it is imperative that authentic assessment is aligned to authentic instruction as well as to real world expectations.

The first assessment (A1): Design & Deliver An HRD Workshop (Group Assessment- 40%) Based on a diagnosis of an HRD problem in an organisation of their choice, students in their groups have to design and deliver a workshop to address the problem/issue. This included the use of instructional design principles along with designing and administering the necessary instruments for needs assessment for peer evaluation and other facilitation material used in the workshop.

Assessment 2 (A2): Critical reflection Report (Individual-35%) This included the following components:

1. Literature Review of the topic (5 refereed journal articles, excluding those used for the design of the workshop Critically discuss the topic of the workshop drawing from the literature.
2. Critical Reflection on the Processes & the Outcomes:
   • (a) outcome of the implementation of the design of the workshop,
   • (b) individual critical reflection on the evaluations and the feedback received from the instructor with specific suggestions for improvement for the workshop.
3. Personal Career Development Plan: Outline their key learnings from the course, and its application to their own career development plans.

Assessment 3 (A3) Interactive Orals – IO (Conducted in the format of a Retrospective which is an Agile term) (Individual-25%) The key objectives of the final assessment using IO:

1. For collection of AACSB data for Program Learning Objective: Oral Communication
2. As an assessment, oral assessment is authentic as it replicates the real situation in professional practice. Oral examination is favoured for assessing ability to think on the feet and to offer rational and robust arguments/ defence to support one’s professional choice/decision, while providing insight into the candidate’s interpretative ability, problem solving and attitude.
3. Enhance academic integrity of the assessment.

How did you do it?
Assessment 3. Interactive Orals – 25% (Retrospective)

Three pre-structured questions were asked to each student. The questions were based on their A1 and A2; so each student had an individually customised set of three questions This is modelled on a Retrospective session in Agile practice which is being popularly adopted for L&D teams in world class organisations. Although, the questions asked in the IO were specifically tailored to the A1 and A2 of the student, the broad framework of the questions was as follows:

1. What were the key learnings from the workshop designed and delivered in A1?
2. What has the student learnt, about their own KSAOs/ competencies and how will they apply it to their role in HRD/ L&D? This question is aimed at the integration of their awareness of their KSAOs acquired through this course with the students’ career goals. (Drawn from their critical reflections and professional development plan section of A2)

Enabling Technology

Youcanbook.me was used in the course as an online booking tool for the interactive oral exam times. The marking was done in ALEC.

Implement

Your Learning and Teaching Consultant can support you to create scaffolded, authentic assessment designs that include interactive orals.

Interactive Oral assessments are the subject of a number of Faculty Spark entries, please refer to the related entries tab to explore specific use cases.

If you would like to use IO as an assessment piece the following points are useful to take note of:

• First and foremost, suggestion is that the assessment piece in this case- IO, must neatly dovetail with the other assessment pieces so as to be congruent with the learning outcomes.
• The use of IO must be based on sound rationale addressing the learning outcomes and clearly identify the objectives it is trying to achieve for the examiner and the examinee.
• There is evidence that structured oral examination is more reliable than the unstructured, hence the questions must be constructed before the examination based on established criteria.
• Equal time for each candidate must be provided for each question with the use of a stop watch.
• The instructor’s (examiner’s) motivation is a significant factor in the success of IO. Does the examiner feel energised with the one on one interaction with the students? Are they genuinely interested in the personal stories the students want to share as a part of the dialogue? This is a primary consideration because the use of IO requires high attention span and active listening for extended period of time, with the ability to evaluate each answer in the short space of time and mark according to the merit of the answers.
• A robust rubric for marking is essential and students need to be made familiar with it before the IO exam.
• Discipline specific scaffolding in terms of exemplar videos and other preparation material must be provided to the students to build confidence in the students.

The importance of keeping a neutral stance cannot be emphasised enough.  The students must be provided a non -threatening and cordial environment during the IO. Recommending that the spirit should be of a ‘dialogue’ as opposed to an ‘interrogation’. The quality of the conversation is the key here. Utmost effort must be made to keep the conversation transparent, open and honest.

Be very alert to the possible unconscious bias like the halo effect, confirmatory bias and similarity bias. Make it an opportunity for establishing meaningful connection with the student.

Next Steps

I will be continuing with the IO in this course as it is an excellent fit for achieving the learning outcomes. The students experience as reported in the evaluation survey has been entirely positive so this piece of assessment needs to be strengthened further with more feedback and instructor experience. Alongside of student experience there is room to improve examiner’s experience by making it more efficient process. The only challenging aspect of using IO is that it can have workload implications. Since no two students were asked the same questions set, it did remarkably well for the academic integrity. The construction of individualised question sets for each candidate based on their previous assessments is time consuming and requires thorough prior preparation of the examiner.

For future, I am exploring options on how to standardise parts of the question set formulation to make it more efficient but at the same time provide the necessary variation to maintain academic integrity.

Griffith Graduate Attributes

This approach develops the following attributes:

• Attribute 1. Knowledgeable and skilled, with critical judgement
• Attribute 2. Effective communicators and collaborators
• Attribute 3. Innovative, creative and entrepreneurial
• Attribute 6. Effective in culturally diverse and international environments

Contributed by

• Learning Futures
  
• Griffith Business School
  Department of Employment Relations and Human Resources
  Dr Sangita De
  (07) 555 27748
  sangita.de@griffith.edu.au
  Griffith Experts profile

Preferred Citation

De, S. & Learning Futures (2019). Connecting Curriculum Design to Careers. Retrieved from https://app.secure.griffith.edu.au/exlnt/entry/8871/view