Open Book Open Web (OBOW) exams

Open Book Open Web (OBOW) Final Examinations

nomination for

Higher Education:Best Innovation in Open and Distance Learning Award

digitalLEARNING World Education Awards

Delhi, India, July 2011

Overview

1. Why OBOW exams?

2. What is an OBOW exam?

3. How to construct an OBOW exam

4. A Sample OBOW exam

5. Summary and conclusions

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1. Why OBOW exams?

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Defining characteristic

• A commitment to authentic assessment

• “... Engaging and worthy problems or questions of importance, in which students must use knowledge to fashion performances effectively and creatively.”

Grant Wiggins

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• multiple-choice tests• fill-in-the-blanks• true-false• matching words• … Students are passive

learners surface learning

Authentic assessment is not:

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"Life is an open book exam."

• Learners need to be convinced of the authenticity of the task if they are to fully engage

Professor Alan Blinder Princeton University

Does this resemble any real world setting?

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SPOT THE COMPUTER?

Sound familiar?

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Constructive alignment (Biggs 1999)

Is there is constructive alignment between the traditional examination instrument, and term

time pedagogy and defined learning outcomes?

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How many articles have been published in leading educational journals over the last 25 years extolling

the virtues of closed book, invigilated examinations?

How often do people solve

problems in real life by locking

themselves in a room for 3 hours with no books, no web access, not

talking to anyone, answering MCQs?

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Is a closed book, invigilated exam

more likely to foster deep

learning … or cramming/ data

dumping?

“Mugging up” is for mugs

• Deep learning will occur only when the learner is actively engaged in, operating upon, or mentally processing, incoming stimuli …

• Authentic, real-world, workplace-integrated assessment is the key to learner engagement

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2. What is an

OBOW exam?

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In brief …

• A semi-structured ‘mini-case (or ‘caselette’)

• Harnesses the power of ICTs to emphasise currency and real world authenticity

• A summative assessment item …… invites the student to draw on all that they have learnt (determining what is relevant).

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Dull? Boring? Something to fear?

• Final assessment

a celebration of learning!

• Boredom and stress not conducive to deep learning

• Important to catch the imagination and appeal to the creativity of the learner

• Multimedia enhancements increase student satisfaction and learning

(O'Brien and Seawell 2004; Vaughan 2001)

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Key features

• Students play the role of decision-maker, auditor, consultant or advisor

• They are presented with a unstructured (open-ended) problem that requires resolution (usually in the form of a set of recommendations)

• No pre-exam night 'cramming'

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The template

• THE CONTEXT: the setting in which the problem/situation is identified and framed

• THE TASK: the project and issues to resolve

• THE GUIDE TO THE TASK: the setting of parameters and suggestions about methods/concepts/models/tools to employ.

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The ground rules

• To minimise the scope for unethical behaviour …

1) Time period for the exam must be sufficiently tight

2) Make clear (as a stated objective of the subject) that demonstrable application of learning is the key to success

3) 'Text-book' impersonal responses will not attract high grades.

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3. A Sample OBOW exam

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An MBA module offered by a KU college …

• The programme is offered online

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Links to background on

company

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Images and multimedia help to contextualise

problem

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Excerpts from third party accounts provide

perspective

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Links to short articles on the

story

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Links to real people

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Students have 24 hours to submit …

Remains authentic

throughout

You have to have invigilated exams or students will

cheat

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1) Students cheat during invigilated exams

2) In the adult learner context, only a small percentage will attempt to cheat

3) These people will cheat whatever the exam instrument

Seldom observed points

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4. How to construct an

OBOW exam

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Getting started

• Keep a look out for material all the time (not exam time!)

• e.g. Local newspaper, periodical websites, magazines, television news or current affairs programmes

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What to look for

• A story that learners can easily relate to in lay terms

• Objective: to get them to think deeply about an issue

• Student to act as ‘expert witness’ – an effective

mechanism for the validation of their learning in their own minds

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Creating a scenario

• Having settled on a theme, gather together various media that can bring the case to life

• The inclusion of hyperlinks, photographs and/or streaming media adds a human dimension

authenticity

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Lead characters

• No story is complete without lead characters

• Using real people with names, and pictures and voices acts as a catalyst to student engagement

• Fictional characters must give the appearance of being real!

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Setting THE TASK

• Role play the bridge between a learner's education and their professional practice

• Placing the learner in the role of the key decision maker, the expert advisor, or the auditor serves to validate the student’s learning

• Revisit the stated learning outcomes … what skills should they have?

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Defining the parameters

• The definition of the assessment task might amount to no more than a paragraph

• Ideally it should invite a wide of variety of

'equally correct' answers

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Striking a balance

• Avoid 'spoon-feeding' but …

• … not so unstructured a student is either struck by 'writers block' or goes off in the wrong direction.

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Expectations

• Before writing THE GUIDE TO THE TASK, it is helpful to develop an outline of the kind of response one expects from the learner and, importantly, …

… how this aligns with the prescribed learning outcomes

• This process may also lead to THE TASK being refined

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5. Summary and conclusions

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OBOW exams …

• A form of assessment that fosters

understanding of learning processes in terms of real-life performance

as opposed to a display of inert knowledge

• Test problem-solving skills not memory

• Equips learners with 21st Century skills

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What OBOW exams deliver…

• An assessment instrument that is more relevant to goals of the curriculum, greater authenticity, where real-world problems take centre-stage

• Allow ICTs to be harnessed to encourage interaction

• Student engagement with the assessment task

induces deeper learning

• Low cost solution for exam delivery in open and distance learning

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• Studies show stimulation with audio will increase retention rate by 20%. If stimulated with audiovisual, memory retention climbs to 30%. If presented with interactive multimedia involvement, the retention rate can be as high as 60%.

-- Tay Vaughan from Multimedia: Making it Work, 5th edition, 2001

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References

• Williams, Jeremy B. (2009)The efficacy of the final examination: a comparative study of closed-book, invigilated exams and open-book, open-web exams (with Amy Wong), British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (2), 227-236).

• Williams, Jeremy B. (2007) E-xams: harnessing the power of ICTs to enhance authenticity, (with Wing Lam and Alton Chua), Educational Technology and Society, 10 (3), 209-221.

• Williams, Jeremy B. (2007) Using digital storytelling as an assessment instrument: Preliminary findings at an onlineuniversity, (with Kanishka Bedi), Proceedings of the 11th CAA Conference, pp.433-447, Loughborough, England, 10-11 July.

• Williams, Jeremy B. (2006) The place of the closed book, invigilated final examination in a knowledge economy, Educational Media International, 43(2), 107-119.

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