Management of learning and assessment processes

Web tools are used to enrich the learning experience for students, and ease the administrative burden for lecturers … a genuine win-win situation. This short paper highlights how at Portsmouth we use our HCI website to support the formative and summative assessment of a large group of final year undergraduates studying a 20 credit unit in HCI. 1. Learning environment Many of our HCI learning resources are web based, mostly consisting of simple web pages, and web viewable documents. An important aspect of our teaching is a process based active management of learning. Students engage in an extended coursework that runs through the main contact period of the unit. Initially students form their own groups, and this data is used to automatically generate a web group directory, and allocate coursework tasks to groups. There are typically fortysomething groups, each of four students, and we use three different coursework tasks that exhibit different categories of HCI application development. Typical categories are: ∞ online applications (often web-based), ∞ the development of an embedded application, or ∞ a desktop application development. Coursework development is staged in accordance with an HCI development lifecycle, and at each stage in the process students report their progress via web forms, and upload evidence of progress in web viewable formats (text, html or graphics files). Tutors view the uploaded evidence online, and provide group formative feedback via email.