Chris Rust and Mandy Jack initiated an exchange about assessment volume, kind and equivalence on the SEDA maillist.
Hours are most easily countable (and even that is not easy). There are also the number of assessment points and the “weight” given to each assessed point. Chris asserted that:
the only meaningful comparison is student hours and providing the total identified learning hours for the module (including the assessment activities) aren’t over 10 per unit credit there’s no problem.
I asked for clarification on the “total identified learning hours” per unit credit.
This is a slight diversion, but the question of equivalence is becoming increasingly important. So, too, is the question of “challenge”.
Toetenel and Rienties (2016) analysed 157 Open University course designs by all levels and activity types. Assessment (as designed or intended by those course teams) hovered around 25% of the time for all 3 UG “levels” and about 21% for PG. I do not know how much time the students actually did put in to each activity. Galvez-Bravo (2016), “… found that modules with more assessments had higher feedback (module appraisal) marks.” Simpson et al (2019) in a UK/US comparison found more assessment (both in number of assessment points and total volume) led to higher grades.
So a should a 15 credit course (150 hours) be expected (or designed) to have about 30-40 hours of assessment arranged over between one and as many as eight points in a semester? Two to four assessed tasks of 10-20 hours each? Where “exam revision” counts towards the total assessment load (two or three hours of exam and 10 hours of cramming the day before)?
rWorld2 