Research methodology
We report on four case studies of staff who took on the challenge of changing their approach to assessment. These have been selected as representative of the range of innovations taking place across the institution. In two of the cases presented below, staff responded to a request to report on innovative approaches to assessment. This was part of a larger project examining innovative assessment practices used in Australian universities. In the other two cases, staff were involved in Deakin's 2004 Online Teaching and Learning Fellowship Scheme and other related unit development projects that enabled them to focus on assessment.
It was not required that lecturers who were interviewed used online resources for assessing their students' knowledge and skills or even that they used online teaching strategies. However, given the context described above, it is not surprising that many of the Deakin staff who were interviewed had been exploring the notion of assessment of online learning, and the cases below have been drawn from this subset.
Given that our interest is in academic professional development, it was appropriate that we use case study methodology because it 'provides an ideal vehicle for communicating with the consumer. It provides him or her a vicarious experience of inquiry setting ... [and] a means for bringing his or her own tacit knowledge to bear' (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, pp. 214-215).
We stress that case study methodology is not intended to underpin generalization. As Stake (1994) noted, the purpose of case study is not to represent the world, but to represent the case" (p. 245). Similarly, the notion of replicability has no place in this form of interpretive research: each case is unique in time, and the study of it likewise. However, the discussion of commonalities from the four cases presented includes a number of features that were similar in many of the cases overall.
Our data-gathering techniques included interviews with teaching staff, examination of student feedback where available and analysis of online documentation (unit resources, online discussion forum, etc.). Interviews were audio-taped and transcribed, and student feedback was taken both from the university-initiated end-of-semester evaluations of teaching and relevant online discussion spaces.
Four cases are presented individually below, with a concluding discussion that draws out some common features and issues. The examples below were selected from our collection of cases because they all used online assessment tasks, they included aspects of formative assessment, and they used student assessment formats that are different from individual essays and tests. The descriptions below focus on only some of the innovative online assessment tasks that the four selected lecturers reported to us, not on other recounted features of their teaching or on the whole range of assessment activities included in their subjects.
