The best kind of mapping...

I have a love-hate relationship with mapping. At its worst, it can be time-consuming, onerous, and not lead to much more wisdom than what we all intuitively knew. At it's best, it gives me fast, visual information that can be easily interpreted and lets me find the areas that I really need to focus on for deeper analysis, and the 'problem' areas in a course that may have remained hidden without it.

Last night Janelle Wheat, Wilma Pfitzner and myself sat in on a Skype conference with Simon Walker and Mark Kerrigan of the University of Greenwich. Janelle and Wilma are facilitating a Course Team symposium in the School of Dentistry focusing on assessment, and in particular e-assessments, and we were keen to start of with a clear representation of what was already happening in the course.

Simon and Mark have been working on some interactive tools for mapping assessments, which they call Map My Programme. You can find out more about these from their website.

A screenshot from the Map My Program tool

In a nutshell, the tools let the course team see what's happening, and make decisions about:

• assessment bunching (the holistic student experience of when assessments are due across a course, and how they are weighted),
• what types of assessments are being used, and which ones are predominating,
• how similar assessment types are being weighted in different subjects, and
• how much formative assessment is being conducted. 

The map is designed in Googledocs, so that all course team members can input their own data, and see the overall impact from a course perspective. In addition, Simon and Mark are working on additional tools which will make this kind of information available to students - excellent for those who struggle with time management!

For me, this is an example of the best kind of mapping. It's simple, collaborative, visual, easy to interpret, and helps me make good, quick decisions or know where to delve more deeply. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the team do with the tool, and how it helps them re-examine and redesign their assessments for learning. Thanks so much to Simon and Mark for your generous sharing!

Other tools we've used in past symposiums, for different purposes, include Grainne Conole's pedagogy profile, which was also great - fast, visual, easy to draw out useful data.

What tools have you been using for mapping, and how are they working for you?