Using SPARKPLUS to facilitate improvements in student’s group work learning | 16 December

The workshop will be interactive and will benefit both the novice and experienced user.  It will begin with an interactive discussion about group work learning.  It will then discuss using  SPARKPLUS to manage group work processes, improve assessment authenticity, validity, student learning, and their learning experience, including setting appropriate criteria, setup options and features, how to interpret the factors, manage non-contributors, free riders and saboteurs, making the most of the monitoring tool and managing objections. There will be a time to ask questions and receive advice about any issues or concerns that both  current and new SPARKPLUS users may have.

Associate Professor Keith Willey is the Leader of the Integrated Engineering Program and Co-director of the Faculty of Engineering Educational Innovation Unit at the University of Sydney, Australia.  He is an Australian Learning and Teaching fellow and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Keith’s commitment to developing high-quality teaching and learning practices is supported by his educational research published in numerous papers and journal articles.  These research interests motivated Keith to lead the development of the learning and self and peer assessment tool known as SPARKPLUS. Keith has been using versions of SPARKPLUS in his teaching since 2002 and is the most experienced and knowledgeable user of the software.  SPARKPLUS has been used worldwide by academic staff to facilitate learning activities for over 600,000 students.