Fairness in assessing group projects: a conceptual framework for higher education

Group projects form a large and possibly growing component of the work undertaken for assessing students in higher education, and especially in post-graduate work in business. Yet the assessments sources, methods and purposes result in an array of combinations that the literature fails to capture in its full complexity. Tutors may be able to assess the work of the group as well as they might the work of any individual. But grades - and degrees - are awarded to individuals. Writers on higher education speak of using self- and peer-assessment as a way of qualifying the evaluation of group work so as to differentiate between individuals. But these commonly used terms - drawn from approaches to assessing individual work - are ambiguous or even misleading in the context of group work. This paper proposes a framework for discussing the assessment of group projects in an effort to help identify how the benefits of group learning and be translated into fairer summative assessments.

WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects

Besides core project partners, the SCI-BUS project also supported several external user communities in developing and setting up customized science gateways. The focus was on large communities typically represented by other European research projects. However, smaller local efforts with the potential of generalizing the solution to wider communities were also supported. This chapter gives an overview of support activities related to user communities external to the SCI-BUS project. A generic overview of such activities is provided followed by the detailed description of three gateways developed in collaboration with European projects: the agINFRA Science Gateway for Workflows for agricultural research, the VERCE Science Gateway for seismology, and the DRIHM Science Gateway for weather research and forecasting.

Student Satisfaction Negates Pedagogic Rights, Theirs and Ours!

This article outlines how the potential for students to be co-participants, via a critical education, risks being further co-opted through the marketization of higher education by constructing students as consumers with power over academics to make judgments on pedagogic quality through student satisfaction ratings. We start by outlining the relevant components of marketization processes, and their associated practices of financialization and managerialism that have developed in response to the “legitimation crisis” in HE and argue that these have profoundly altered the university landscape with a significant impact on our working practices. Student engagement is increasingly being appropriated as a quantifiable measurement of “student satisfaction”, which then profoundly alters the teaching and learning experience with different understandings of what acquiring knowledge requires and what it feels like. We draw on our experience of working in the post 1992 sector to describe how we are increasingly working under conditions of “reified exchange” and how this affects our relationships with students, other academics and management, eroding our pedagogic rights and theirs in the process. Specifically, we conclude that marketization is likely to further reduce the institutional space and opportunities for both lecturers and students to exercise their “pedagogic rights” to personal enhancement, social inclusion and civic participation through education.

Gold, power, protest: Digital and social media and protests against large-scale mining projects in Colombia

Colombia’s Internet connectivity has increased immensely. Colombia has also ‘opened for business’, leading to an influx of extractive projects to which social movements object heavily. Studies on the role of digital media in political mobilisation in developing countries are still scarce. Using surveys, interviews, and reviews of literature, policy papers, website and social media content, this study examines the role of digital and social media in social movement organisations and asks how increased digital connectivity can help spread knowledge and mobilise mining protests. Results show that the use of new media in Colombia is hindered by socioeconomic constraints, fear of oppression, the constraints of keyboard activism and strong hierarchical power structures within social movements. Hence, effects on political mobilisation are still limited. Social media do not spontaneously produce non-hierarchical knowledge structures. Attention to both internal and external knowledge sharing is therefore conditional to optimising digital and social media use.