Case study: Philosophy and Society podcasts for assessed groupwork

Department of Philosophy
Chris Jay and Barry Lee

Chris Jay and Barry Lee describe their approach to diversifying assessment in the Undergraduate degree programme by introducing a group-based podcast assessment. They outline the rationale for the approach, the processes they undertook, the outcomes of consultation they carried out with students and other departments to design the assessment, the ways in which they supported the students undertaking groupwork activities, and the outcomes of the initiative including feedback from their students.

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Philosophy and Society podcasts for assessed groupwork (Panopto viewer) (11 mins 39 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So we're just going to say a bit about what we do and also a little bit about why we do it in the context of the philosophy degree. And just something to mention, given what you've just said before we kick off, we actually ran the second part of this module during lockdown with things online last year, and a lot of what we're talking about here seems to be replicable quite well online, so I think that's that's an encouraging aspect. But I'm going to let Barry start us off.

Okay, just to give a very quick overview of the module, in it groups of student work together to produce a podcast which explores a contemporary issue of value, so that means either a question in ethics and morality, such as 'Should there be a ban on military AI systems which choose their own targets?' or a question in the arts. They might ask a general question about arts, like what's the point of art.

Okay, next. So this is quite a departure for philosophy. Typically we ask students to complete assessments, which are essentially writing an essay which is presenting one answer to a question and defending that answer. So the podcast task is different not only in terms of being a recording of some spoken material, but also in terms of the task being really more about explanation and mapping the debate to allow a non-expert to understand it better and think it through for themselves. So partly we wanted to motivate students to think about that explanatory understanding side of philosophy, but there were other reasons for creating the module as well, and they were to do with the sorts of skills and abilities which we were or weren't developing so well with our other forms of assessment.

So, of course, we wanted to get students to have a bit more experience of working together to address complex and difficult intellectual tasks, which there's a certain amount of, of course, in seminars, but we felt we could do more to motivate with our assessment tasks. And we wanted for citizenship reasons as much as for pedagogical philosophy reasons to help people to explore contemporary issues carefully and to some extent, dispassionately.

We're always looking for ways to explain to students and show to students how they can apply what they're doing in philosophy, in terms of philosophical knowledge, but also in terms of philosophical skills. And this module allows them to apply philosophical knowledge and skills to real life problems and contentious issues. So we like that aspect of it, and I think they do, too.

And we also think that an important part of philosophy and of course other arts and humanities and other academic disciplines is that it can set people up with the skills to communicate complex and difficult ideas clearly in a way that's accessible to non-experts, because it allows students to pull out the essence of things and this is a task that's well designed to encourage them to do that and support them in doing that. Generally, of course, as well, for employability reasons and general life reasons, we also felt that it was important to give them a context in which students could negotiate challenges that arise from working together in negotiation in that context.

So if we wanted to have a group work element, why choose a podcast in particular? Well, the podcast seemed like a natural format to use given that the topics are topics where there is discussion and where there are different views to air. And as well, podcasts encourage an accessible presentation style. So that's really feeding into the skills of explaining things clearly. And we like the fact that having a recording rather than a live presentation allows students to hone and shape that presentation with perhaps a little bit less stress.

There's also a creative aspect, of course, and that allows students to have input in ways that might not be having a speaking role, but are to do with thinking about contributing to discussions about what the best format to use for presenting the ideas in might be.

And then it's much more practicable, we think, for fair and objective markings than a live presentation might be in terms of making material accessible to third markers and external examiners and things. It's more obvious what the marking process has been.

Okay, in designing the module, we consulted carefully with a number of people around the university. We spoke to our own students in philosophy about what their concerns would be about doing such a kind of module. We spoke to students and departments already running group work modules who had experience of them. We spoke to York Careers and Placements, and we spoke to academic staff in your departments already running group work modules.

Here's some key points from those consultations. It became very clear that our own students had as their primary concern free loading. That they'd end up in groups where some of the other members weren't pulling their weight and then would get, as they would think it, unfairly rewarded by receiving the group mark. We spoke to students who already had experience of group assessments. They also mentioned freeloading as a concern, and they very helpfully said that there were interesting and unhelpful differences between their experience of group work and paid employment and what tended to happen in university group work assignments, in that there was a lack of what you might call management oversight. Staff members weren't coming in to check up on how they were doing, how the group was getting along.

Careers suggested emphasising that the challenges that you face in group work are actually opportunities to gain experience and develop skills, all of which can be potentially related to prospective employers once you've completed your degree. And something that other departments gave us were some very useful models of peer evaluation which helps to address the freeloading concern.

So what have we ended up with? Well, students work in groups of between three and five and they research their topic and they research in particular the philosophical issues which arise from that topic. And in the first instance, they're asked to identify their preferred topic area. So currently we offer areas as follows: Technology and Responsibility, Freedom of Conscience, Nationhood and Morality, Freedom of Speech and The Arts. And we've tried to give quite a constrained list of topics to choose from so as to make grouping people together into their preferred topics possible rather than having too diffuse a range of things people want to work on. So groups are created on the basis of topic choice, and we ask students to nominate a first choice and in practise only really a second choice. We ask for a third if necessary.

So once formed, groups decide as their first task on a specific question within their topic area to pursue and of course, the module coordinators facilitate those discussions with an eye to where the philosophical issues which arise might be. And the presentations are supposed to be designed to explain and explore the topic, rather than to reach a conclusion about what the correct thing to say about that topic is. Students decide later on in the module on the details of the presentation in terms of which formats would be most appropriate to use. Two-headers, guest interviews, Vox Pops, people taking on the role of an expert on a particular kind of view, for example, and trainings provided by Wayne and some of his very helpful colleagues on the use of Audacity and the editing software which we used.

I should say that the recording stage last time round was done over Zoom because we were all online and that that seemed to work out quite well as well. So the module runs in the second half of Year 2 in spring and summer and it's currently optional, but it will become compulsory in coming years.

Okay, so when they talk about a number of ways that we supported group working on the module and in particular how we address these concerns about freeloading. So the first element there were regular timetabled group meetings. So there's a single two hour timetable session for all of the groups in most weeks of the module run. In those sessions, groups consider what individuals or members have prepared since the last meeting, and they work together to develop their understanding and ideas. And we as module convenors oversee those meetings and we drop in on the groups to discuss ideas and talk to them about their progress.

Each group is required to complete a Work Log and originally that was intended to just be a Google Doc which was shared amongst the group members and also shared with the convenors. That's grown into a richer resource for most groups, which they use for keeping track of all sorts of aspects of their discussion. The Work Log is a compulsory part of the final submission in that there's a marked deduction if it's not submitted, but the Work Log isn't marked.

Okay, third element of supporting group working: peer-evaluation. At the end of the module, students have an opportunity to return confidential numerical feedback on the team members performance during the module. Currently, we ask them to address three factors: contribution to content, contribution to team working and contribution to meeting deadlines; both the formal deadlines that we set and deadlines that the group sets for submission of development work. Those goals get fed into an algorithm which returns as suggested that is merely advisory individual adjustment to the group mark for individual marks for the podcast. And that algorithm's designed so that if all of the members in a group, for instance, mark each other up, then they all end up with just the original group mark for the assessment.

Okay, here's some feedback. The module has been well received. It is worth saying that the people who were on this module were self-selecting in this first run with this feedback so you'd expect reasonable scores, but it's also worth saying that these scores are very high in the range for what we usually expect from philosophy modules. You might be a little bemused by the idea that there's a lecture score here. Chris and I give little presentations during the module on particular aspects, like how you would structure a podcast, where a podcast should be pitched in terms of pro style and presentation style, so that's the score for those. I think it's particularly worth noting the Intellectual stimulation score of 4.9. One thing that students really enjoyed in this module was the independence that they had and the fact that they were developing their own ideas, selecting and selecting their own topic.