Teaching development grants final and financial report: A study of online evidence-based assessment system to promote collaborative and cooperative learning in group activities

Many courses involve group activities to let students to collaborate and work together to solve problems. However, it is not easy to ensure all students are actively contributed and collaborate with each other. Besides, teachers usually collect the final outcome and mark it as a whole, it is difficult to assess the group project fairly within a group if the workload is unevenly distributed. In this project, we proposed "An Online Evidence-based Assessment System" for students to carry out group activities such as discussion, writing report, sharing resources, etc. The system can keep track of individuals' progress and compare with the other group members. Students can check their current progress, such as the number of posts, replies and completed tasks, to promote active engagement and collaborative learning. Whereas teachers can get the activity log of all students in the class, which could be used to set assessment criteria and identify free-riders. To study the effect of this online evidence-based assessment approach in higher education, nine courses were using this platform for conducting group activities in 2018-19. The results showed that this interactive system can benefit both teachers and students on learning, teaching and assessment.