Negotiated and authentic assessment with a focus on creative processes – case studies from courses in digital media

Kapitel i bok, 2006

The Centre for Digital Media and Higher Education at Chalmers University of Technology manages two masters programs, namely, Technical Communication (Teknisk Kommunikation) for civil engineers and Entertainment Design and Technology at the IT University of Göteborg. Both of these programs focus on the planning, production and critical evaluation of digital media and digital applications. This is a complex and multidisciplinary area where holistic understanding and artistic approaches rival technical know-how in importance. Our preferred pedagogy is problem based learning. Although we help with suggestions and examples of previous work it is usually the students who come up with a problem or project they would like to work on work on within digital media. The problem is usually practical and like the students in mechanical engineering, who are mentioned earlier in this book, our students tend to conceive, design, implement and operate a product. In our case the end result is usually a digital application, such as a web site, a computer game or a short film. These projects mimic many aspects of the professional work that awaits the students after their education since they have a finished product as a goal. As a course planner you are faced with two alternatives; either give the students hypothetical projects or actual reallife projects. Even before starting a course it is obvious that hypothetical projects have advantages. An hypothetical project can be custom-tailored to exactly correspond to the learning objectives of the course. It also simplifies planning since the only parties involved are the teachers and the students. But what about the benefits of real-life projects? Would not a student project where the students worked on actual projects, with actual partners/clients, enhance their learning, at least when it comes to preparing them for future professional assignments? And would not these more realistic and demanding projects be more interesting and fun for the students to work on? After several years of experiments with such projects we have a few experiences and lessons learned which we would like to discuss.