Now what? Pedagogical implications of a shift to open book assessment of vector calculus

Abstract

During the global pandemic, a drastic change in higher-level education took place in assessment. The traditional closed book format had to evolve to a technology-mediated open book assessment for engineering students in a vector calculus course. It became evident that the traditional format was no longer in line with the modern world both functionally and didactically. Such change in the assessment places a responsibility upon us as teachers for constructive alignment of the teaching and learning environment. In this paper, we identify four categories of pedagogical implications and conclude with concrete suggestions for classroom practice.

The increasing necessity of skills diversity in team teaching

“…We were forced into a position of setting questions that assessed for higher order skills and conceptual understanding instead of falling back on questions that were more procedural or relied on memory. We have written about this elsewhere [1,2].…”

“…We gratefully acknowledge Tugce Akkaya and Amanuel Gecer for their invaluable contributions to this project. For further information on this project, including comparison of results, we direct the reader to [1], [2] and [7].…”

“…This short paper forms part of documenting a larger project of exploring the design journey of shifting from traditional assessment to technology-mediated assessment in vector calculus. Elsewhere [1,2,7] we have discussed design principles, consequences for pedagogy and comparison of student results.This paper contributes to the conversation on team teaching in mathematics, highlighting the need for explicit roles to be filled by the team members. We provide context of the technology-mediated assessment project, discuss certain aspects of team teaching with special emphasis on roles, then analyse our practice in terms of roles and team teaching practice.…”