Alice Schmidt Hanbidge & Katherine Lithgow, Renison University College, University of Waterloo
This case study describes a program-wide use of a PebblePad workbook to support formative and summative assessment in an online Master of Social Work graduate program with 150 students and 150 external assessors. Program goals include cultivating habits of lifelong learning by enhancing students’ communication skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities and preparing them for post-graduation employment. A PebblePad workbook was designed with these goals in mind and facilitated effective mechanisms for authentic, direct measures of assessment, and included self-assessment, peer, and faculty feedback processes. Using the workbook to guide and assess learning has helped shift the program from a didactic model toward a more student-centered model. An additional benefit in managing the administration of the external assessors was PebblePad’s student-selected external assessor option. This enables each of the 150 practicing professionals external to the institution to have access to the student’s capstone project for assessment, without the administrative burden of providing University credentials. Following a positive introduction of PebblePad for formative and summative assessment processes and the inclusion of practitioners as external assessors, students are simultaneously supported to develop reflective learning skills needed in the field.
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