Advantages
The infographic and
video
presentation
are authentic real-world tasks which encourage creativity, and the development of skills to communicate complex issues to a range of different public audiences. Arguably, these are ‘authentic’ skills that are expected in contemporary work. These tasks also give students tangible artifacts that they can include in their work portfolios and later share with employers.
As
multimodal
tasks, the infographic and video presentation offer an alternative to text-heavy assessment methods. They provide opportunities for diverse students to express and demonstrate their learning in different ways and excel. These are aligned with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
There are also advantages for marking. Potentially it is more enjoyable and takes less time to mark an infographic and video presentation compared to a text-based assignment.
Challenges
Turnitin flags a high matching rates percentage due to common references. These need to be evaluated.
Turnitin cannot check images submitted by students. Hence a requirement is that students submit images which include and text.
Tips for implementation
It is important to provide scaffolding for the infographic and video by providing students with resources (examples and templates) to help benchmark their work. This includes teaching students to:
- Communicate effectively in terms of the trade-offs between words and graphics, maps, charts etc.
- Breaking back complex information to the critical components for the infographic and video presentation .
Learning outcomes
- Understand and apply economic concepts to the issue of climate change.
- Critically evaluate the economic outcome of climate change policy.
- Communicate economic thinking in non-technical, plain language via different formats.
How it supports academic integrity
Students are required to be physically and clearly visible in the recording of their own video production. Hence the ability to outsource this task is limited. As this task is not text-based and requires higher-order thinking, it may be less vulnerable to academic misconduct using generative AI.