With funding secured for an iPad pro with Apple Pencil, we are now underway with the paperless marking workflow pilot study. The first step will be to survey participants about the current workflow for marking one of their regular assignments. This might involve printing out student work and writing on it, printing a marking sheet to use with students in the classroom, or perhaps writing a feedback document on a computer with student work open alongside.
There are some aspects to the way we do things now that might be less than sustainable, or could be improved (Atkinson & Lim, 2014). For example, a class set of essays could run to upwards of 100 pages (a recent count of a set of 25 of my student’s essays came to around 120). Printing these out is the obvious low-hanging fruit of un-sustainability. But working on them with a traditional keyboard and mouse interface has its drawbacks too (Popyak et. al., 2003). For example, while there’s software available that allows a teacher to leave comments directly on the student’s work, this would require restricting the format for hand-ins and the process of highlighting and leaving typed comments on student work often feels like overkill and takes a long time. Leaving comments using tracked changes in a Word document, for example, is laborious and time consuming, even fiddly. One colleague says he’s never found a computer program that’s easier than scribbling on paper with a pen.
Our current use of computer technology in our marking workflow hasn’t changed all that much for decades (Popyack et. al., 2003). The keyboard and mouse are still our primary forms of input, for example. And although stylus-and-tablet style input has been available for decades as well, uptake in the average office doesn’t seem to have taken off. I have a tablet sitting on my desk gathering dust, and there are several reasons I don’t use it.
Firstly, it turned out to be quite a steep learning curve to aquire the skill of writing with a computer stylus. Initial attempts had my handwriting looking like that of a child because the movements required to produce writing on a screen while not looking at the tip of the pen on a completely different surface were totally unfamiliar.
The accuracy of the tool was also very frustrating as the nib on the stylus has quite a lot of play. These kinds of tablet and stylus have improved a lot in recent years, but the learning curve problem still remains.
The other observation informing this research is that although touch screen tablets have been available now for long enough that most people will have at least had a try with one, none of my colleagues use one for work. It’s still easier to print out paper marking sheets as a mobile marking solution, which I suspect is again due to a clumsy physical interface: it’s difficult to produce handwriting on a touch screen (even in most cases with a stylus) and touch screen keyboards are slow and don’t give haptic feedback to the user. Especially when holding the tablet by hand at the same time.
These technological barriers to paperless marking might be able to be overcome with new and emerging technology. One example of this is the iPad pro and Apple Pencil. The device has a refresh rate which allows some of the greatest accuracy or drawing and writing so far seen in these devices (iPad Pro - Apple (NZ), n.d.), and the fact that the user is able to write directly on the screen and see the results at the same time could help to eliminate the learning curve issue mentioned above.
Is there finally a technology-based solution to a sustainable workflow for marking student work? That’s what we aim to find out.
Atkinson, D., & Lim, S. L. (2014). Improving Assessment Processes in Higher Education: Student and Teacher Perceptions of The Effectiveness of A Rubric Embedded in a LMS. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 5, 651-666.
iPad Pro - Apple (NZ). (n.d.). Retrieved May 15, 2018, from https://www.apple.com/nz/ipad-pro/
Popyack, J. L., Herrmann, N., Char, B., Zoski, P., Cera, C., & Lass, R. (2003). Pen-Based Electronic Grading of Online Student Submissions. Syllabus. Retrieved from http://duplex.cs.drexel.edu/docs/Syllabus_Popyack_Drexel.pdf