My colleague Beth Sheppard, who teaches teacher training courses in distance education, invited me to be a guest speaker in her online course, PALSS (Practical Applications in Listening and Speaking Skills). With her help, I gave a 45 minute webinar on what has proven to be my topic for summer and fall 2012: pedagogical benefits and challenges of video-recorded assessment. This webinar took place on Tuesday, November 20, 2012.

This webinar was delivered during real time via Blackboard Connect. It was a new experience for me to use this interface to connect with eight or so English teachers from around the world. Although they could only hear me speak, they were able to participate via synchronous chat. While I gave my talk and showed my PowerPoint slides, Beth posed questions and highlight key points from my talk in the chat interface.

Since the discussion in this interface is lecture style, one way that we were able to make this webinar more interactive was through the use of polling. Every few slides or so during my talk, I would post a question and multiple choice answers that the participants could select. As a group, we could all see the answers that every participant gave. It was interesting and very relevant to use polling as a way of gauging audience knowledge and future application interest on a given topic.

After I was finished with my talk, the focused turned to the online course participants. I was pleased to see that a few of them regularly use some sort of video-recording component as evidence when assessing their students. A few were motivated to try it and the discussed turned towards ways that they could fully or partially implement this task into their own pedagogy.

After attending EDUCAUSE and hearing about the ways that participants around the world use video in their assessment of speaking task, one key phrase that stands out in my mind is BYOD: bring your own (mobile) device. This philosophy of technology use in education encourages institutions to have students utilize the mobile devices that they already own as opposed to spending money on technology initiatives to provide the same centralized service. It’s a very interesting topic for higher education, especially for the majority of university students who I teach, whom often have one or several mobile devices at their disposal. I hope to expand more on this topic another time.