Spotlight on SOTL: Alternatives to Essays – Considerations for new approaches
This article is based on the following research article:
Highland, K. D., & Fedtke, J. (2023). Rethinking the essay: Student perceptions of collaborative digital multimodal composition in the college classroom. Higher Education Pedagogies, 8(1), 2216194. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2023.2216194
The essay has remained a staple in learning institutions across the globe from high school to post-secondary education. But just how relevant are they in our modern digital world? Researchers Kristen Highland and Jana Fedtke challenged the traditional essay by offering students a collaborative digital multi-modal composition project.
What did the researchers do and find?
Highland and Fedtke examined student experience in two advanced undergraduate literature courses in which a collaborative digital multimodal writing project was used in place of a traditional written essay. Students were asked to work collaboratively to develop and write their arguments, incorporating multimedia sources such as video, images, and music in addition to course texts and scholarly secondary sources. The project was completed using Scalar, a digital multimodal writing platform that allows for diverse ways of organising information, including the ability to incorporate image, sound, and video texts.
The authors collected data on student experiences through an open-ended and anonymous written reflection designed to elicit their perceptions of the purposes, processes, and value of this project in relation to a traditional essay. Students identified creativity as an enjoyable and generative aspect of the project, expressing how it allowed them to exert more ownership over their ideas and facilitate a more personal relationship with their work. Additionally, students expressed how the project impacted their ability to make new analytical connections between texts and ideas, as well as think about evidence and relevance in a broader way. While some students were frustrated at the Scalar software, expressed comfort with the traditional essay format, and were reluctant to participate in group work, the project satisfied students’ desire for digital integration in their undergraduate education and improved learning outcomes through the collaboration and integration of diverse ideas.
How might you use this research in your teaching?
As instructors, it can be easy to default to longstanding established evaluation tools like the traditional essay, but it’s important to challenge how and why we use these assignments, as well as their impact on student learning. Alternatives to traditional essays can offer a myriad of benefits that cater to diverse learning preferences, foster creativity, encourage collaboration, improve learning outcomes, and better prepare students for the complexities of the real world. While valuable in their own right, traditional essays may fail to capture the range of abilities and talents students possess. Integrating alternative assignments into the classroom allows students to interact with the material in different and often more relevant ways. This diversified approach promotes critical thinking, collaboration, and communication of ideas, which are essential skills in today’s interconnected and digital society. The adoption of alternative assessments reflects a commitment to holistic and student-centred education, enriching the learning experience of students by allowing them to interact with learning material in new and unique ways beyond the traditional essay.
For more ideas around other assessment approaches, see Beyond the Exam: An Alternative Online Assessment Toolkit, a collaborative project between Brock University, College Boreal and McMaster University, and was made possible with funding by the Government of Ontario and through eCampusOntario’s support of the Virtual Learning Strategy.
Spotlight on SOTL, Updates