Formative Assessment through Computer Mediation: Enriching Student Engagement

Abstract

Student engagement is emerging as one of the strong challenges for university teachers. Digital natives not only stand out from their predecessors because of their technology suaveness but also due to their disenchantment with the traditional student engagement. The irony of Digital immigrants teaching Digital natives highlights the sauveness of them in usage of skill and aptitude in technology but also focuses and delineates their peculiar perspective, needs and demands. It widens the bridge of effective student engagement. The time demands to have collaborative and innovative engagements suiting to the purpose of these new-millennials. This inference is the basis of usage of web 2.0 as a learning-teaching tool. The technology-driven learning has actually changed the dynamics of learning acquisition. It has facilitated the creation of learning spaces 'for learners' and 'by learners'. It has also taken out the learning out of the confined of 'mortar and brick' classrooms to that of 'mortar and clicks'. This has helped them in acquiring learning at their own pace, space and time. Keeping all this in mind, a pilot project was launched for a course where the use of hypermedia was used. This paper encompasses insights from this pilot project involving 441 undergraduate students of an Engineering college. Blogging was chosen as the engagement tool. The paper will discuss the methodology and the results from the work. The paper intends to promote the blogging as successful and innovative tool for learning and students engagement.