Assessment, Feedback and Technology: Contexts and Case Studies in Bloomsbury

In 2014, the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) Consortium initiated a wide-ranging, two-year-long research and dissemination project focusing on the use of technology in assessment and feedback. Our aim was to understand and improve processes, practices, opportunities and tools available to the institutional members of the BLE Consortium. From the project, we produced three research papers investigating current practice and 21 case studies describing both technology-enabled pedagogy and technical development. Now presented as a free ebook, co-edited by Leo Havemann and Sarah Sherman, we offer the flavour of the variety and breadth of the BLE’s activities relating to the project theme as a contribution to the education sector’s widening conversation about the interplay of assessment, feedback, pedagogy and technology.

Nurturing global collaboration and networked learning in higher education

We consider the principles of communities of practice (CoP) and networked learning in higher education, illustrated with a case study. iCollab has grown from an international community of practice connecting students and lecturers in seven modules across seven higher education institutions in six countries, to a global network supporting the exploration and evaluation of mobile web tools to engage in participatory curriculum development and supporting students in developing international collaboration and cooperation skills. This article explores the interplay of collaboration and cooperation, CoP and networked learning; describes how this interplay has operated in iCollab; and highlights opportunities and challenges of learning, teaching and interacting with students in networked publics in higher education.

Print versus digital texts: understanding the experimental research and challenging the dichotomies

This article presents the results of a systematic critical review of interdisciplinary literature concerned with digital text (or e-text) uses in education and proposes recommendations for how e-texts can be implemented for impactful learning. A variety of e-texts can be found in the repertoire of educational resources accessible to students, and in the constantly changing terrain of educational technologies, they are rapidly evolving, presenting new opportunities and affordances for student learning. We highlight some of the ways in which academic studies have examined e-texts as part of teaching and learning practices, placing a particular emphasis on aspects of learning such as recall, comprehension, retention of information and feedback. We also review diverse practices associated with uses of e-text tools such as note-taking, annotation, bookmarking, hypertexts and highlighting. We argue that evidence-based studies into e-texts are overwhelmingly structured around reinforcing the existing dichotomy pitting print-based (‘traditional’) texts against e-texts. In this article, we query this approach and instead propose to focus on factors such as students’ level of awareness of their options in accessing learning materials and whether they are instructed and trained in how to take full advantage of the capabilities of e-texts, both of which have been found to affect learning performance.