C-SAP FINDINGS
VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR ASSESSMENT IN UNDERGRADUATE
TEACHING AND LEARNING
Key words: Video, CD-Rom, Assessment
Discipline: Anthropology
Project Leader: Felicia Hughes-Freeland
Project Participants: Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Margaret Kenna
Summary
The project developed means of diversifying methods for teaching, learning and
assessment at undergraduate level. Students participated in the design of assessment
criteria, and submitted 39 CD-ROMs (for the History of Anthropological Theory) and 8
visual ethnographies on video ( for Visual Anthropology).
Activities
There were two stages: planning and design by the two project participants, and
implementation with the participation of the students. We used funds from the UWS
Teaching Innovation Fund for tutorial support to facilitate both stages. We also used
Blackboard to support each module and others throughout the year.
During Teaching Block 1 we planned and designed the schedule and logistics of the
practical teaching and learning. The project was aimed at developing assessment
strategies, but it was necessary to develop simple and effective means to provide
adequate training. After a lengthy process we successfully negotiated facilities with the
university and found staff to provide training in scanning and editing over the period
February to April: a postgraduate, and a freelance news cameraman. Researching the
design was a challenge due to a shortage of existing guidelines. The booklet on
‘portfolios’ from the Generic Learning Centre had been helpful in devising the hard-copy
portfolio used previously as a means of assessment, but there did not seem to be any
resource which suggested ways of tackling using the CD-ROM as a learning device, or
ways of assessing it. Criteria for assessing video work are limited to university courses
such as Manchester’s MA in Visual Anthropology, and guidelines provided for selecting
ethnographic films at festivals. It was also necessary to revise existing module outlines
and process paperwork with Quality Committees.
Both modules were taught in Teaching Block 2. The 50 minute ‘scanning training’
session was deemed equivalent to a 1,000 word piece of ‘formative coursework’ for the
module, hence students did not feel that they were having to do more for this module than
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for others. The scanning training went extremely well with 100% attendance, and the
tutor found time in 50 minutes to introduce the students to Power Point, which some were
able to use in the CD-ROMs. The trainer kept weekly ‘Surgery Hours’ and offered
‘Emergency Surgeries’ in the week before work was due. Video editing training started
in the fourth week after all the students had filmed a basic exercise and received detailed
feedback. Working in the same groups, they filmed and logged 30 minutes max of
material, and were taught in one hour to capture and cut short films of 5 minutes; in
future it should be two hours. These exercises were debriefed in a seminar with the
editing tutor present. For the final projects, student teams (of two, and in one case, three,
initially) had access to three cameras over three weeks and tutorial help for two half days
per team over two weeks. They were required to film 60 minutes of rushes, which they
had to cut into films of not more than 10 minutes. The process was very compressed, with
no time for feedback on rough cuts. All guidance was from the tutor, and the lecturer
refrained in the name of fairness from seeing the work until it was finished.
For both parts of the project we researched and designed documentation for discussion
with the students. Time was set aside for consulting the students taking the modules to
discuss and determine assessment criteria. For the CD-ROMs, they were grouped in twos
and threes, and asked to discuss what criteria they felt were most appropriate, having
been provided with the ‘bench-marking’ criteria for Anthropology, and the Learning
Outcomes for the module for level 2 and level 3. In Visual Anthropology two one-hour
seminars were dedicated to assessment and took the form of focus groups. Discussion
documents were provided, as well as the discipline-specific documentation used for the
CD-ROM group. For the Visual Anthropology students, the main points of concern were
the balance of marks between the video and the reflexive report (which together formed
50% of the module assessment), and how anthropological relevance should be assessed.
The group decided on a 50/50 balance of marks, and an assessment of anthropological
relevance limited to the written report. The process of assessment involved reading the
reports, seeing the films with the students as a group, then re-viewing the films and rereading the reports. Both the second marker (who followed a similar procedure alone)
and the external were asked to view all eight films.
In neither case did the students support formal peer-assessment, nor did the technical
trainers contribute to formal assessment. We did however ask for informal technical
feedback in both modules.
Outcomes
For both modules, standard feedback report forms for assessed work were amended on
the basis of student recommendations. For the CD-ROMs for The History of
Anthropological Theory, Content and Structure were deemed the two most important
criteria of evaluation (35% each), then Technical Competence (20%) and Written
Expression least (10%), at both level 3 and level 2. For Visual Anthropology a different
form had to be constructed. In Visual Anthropology, students proved reluctant to trust to
their image production, and opted for a 50-50 balance of marks between the video and
the reflexive report. Ironically, everyone would have gained higher marks if the original
proposal of 65% for the film and 35% for the report had been followed. Once the marks
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are finalized, students will be given a final chance to give feedback to finalize
recommendations for future practice.
In The History of Anthropological Theory, 24 level 3 students and 15 level 2 students
produced CD-ROMs, 39 in all. All demonstrated a basic technical competence in
scanning, and some displayed very high levels of technical proficiency in design and
presentation. Topics included original research into a distant relative from Victorian
times who had published an ethnographic survey of a part of India, using family
documents and other memorabilia, early explorers (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Isabella Bird, and Mary Kingsley), expeditions (Torres Straits, Jesup North Pacific,
Lewis and Clark), and the early ethnographic filmmaker, Robert Flaherty (this by
students also doing Visual Anthropology). A sample of work was marked by both project
participants. Highest marks were gained by those students who devised labelled
‘pathways’ through the material, and evaluated its usefulness for other users (the Content
and Structure criteria). It was clear that, apart from technical competence in scanning and,
in some cases employing Power Point, students had acquired valuable skills in structuring
the presentation of such materials in a logical and ‘user-friendly’ way.
In Visual Anthropology, 15 students worked in 7 teams (and eventually 8), to research
and produced ‘portraits’ of persons or places in and around Swansea. The topics included
a family sportswear business, a man who swims everyday in the Bristol Channel, a
circus-skills training session, school visits to the University’s Egypt Centre (a reflection
of a joint honours Anthropology and Egyptology student doing the module), an art class,
skateboarding, a woman working for SUSTANS, and anti-war demonstrations. All films
were assessed in the class of 2.1 and upwards, but some of the reports did not show such
a high level of attention, so some marks were pulled down.
In the case of Visual Anthropology there was an extra outcome. Six Swansea students,
three of whom had done the module, participated in a field school organised out of the
University of Glamorgan. The project convenor acted as Assistance Director of the
School and Director of the visual project, which aims to produce a 25 minute video. She
ran an initial training day, and the three Swansea students acted as tutors, with ongoing
responsibility to oversee filming practice for the rest of the field school. A viewing of 10
hours of rushes at the end of the school showed what an excellent job they had done, so
they were well able to transfer their skills. We are currently expecting the film to be
edited in Swansea by two students who participated on the field school and another visual
anthropology student; of the three, two did the visual anthropology module, and will train
the third student who didn’t.
Implications
I begin with the comments from our external examiner, Dr Garry Marvin:
‘Two areas that are new to me this year deserve the highest praise - the production
of CD ROMs for the History of Anthropological Theory and the video films for Visual
Anthropology. In both of these courses the students have been encouraged to use their
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imagination and skills to produce truly original work rather than repeating and
commenting on the work of other anthropologists. Obviously a huge amount of thought
and effort has gone into the planning of these courses and, within the limited resources
available, great effort has been made to provide the students with the necessary training
to produce their CD ROMS and videos. I am afraid that I am someone whose eyes
usually glaze over at the mention of ‘transferable skills’ but in these two courses there
really are genuine and significant transferable skills. The ability to design a project on
CD ROM with all the necessary research into web resources, the creative use of graphics
and the hyperlinks etc and the skills of visual production in terms of design, filming and
editing are skills that will certainly have a potential use outside the academic world.
These two courses successfully bring new media into productive contact with academic
anthropology and constitute a most valuable addition to the range of anthropology
on offer at Swansea. Such courses inevitably require considerable resourcing and I hope
that the University will consider the possibility of offering more funding to allow their
further development.’
The students were challenged and although there were steep learning curves in both
cases, there was general enthusiasm about the opportunities to use these new methods as
part of an academic curriculum (some student comments may be found in the
appendices).
There were practical problems in ‘embedding’ these practices, as the Library and
Information Services section of University of Wales Swansea cannot at present support
specialist IT undergraduate training in scanning and editing software. In terms of
sustainability, resources will be needed each time the modules are taught to fund this
training. Access to the faculty IT room would also be crucial for scanning training. As far
as video editing is concerned, the university’s stand-alone ‘Purple’ system will be
available and operates very reliably and to a high standard. For the future, to open up the
video training to a wider number of students at different level, it would be necessary to
find resources for editing software that could be used in a newly opened self-study
computer laboratory. The cost of access however would be a loss of reliability.
To promote best practice in our institution, we intend to hold a School seminar about the
C-SAP project in the hope of encouraging colleagues in using visual technologies and
assessment in their own module topics. A version of this report will also go to the UWS
Teaching Innovation Committee that matched C-SAP funds for this project. The
University’s Learning and Teaching Committee is also aware of this project and its
potential, and will be presented with a copy of this report.
In the long term we need to consider how these two sets of skills fit into the wider skills
training platform provided by universities, and how much priority they should be given.
If more information-delivery can be done through Blackboard, space for a module could
be made available. In the meantime, Blackboard usage by students and staff is patchy.
Institutional support for basic staff training is good, but there is no institutional support
whatsoever to assist with packaging and transferring course material to Blackboard.
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A final comment is that visual assessment cannot be essentialized any more than ‘written
assessment’ can. Assessment criteria have to be associated with the overall learning
outcomes and skill acquisition for the module, as well as reflecting disciplinary
benchmarking criteria and standards.
Resources
 Course outlines.
 Basic technical instructions.
 Marking sheets summarising the relevant assessment criteria.
 Website to include some of the above, and samples of work from the 39 CDROMs and 8 videos, subject to copyright and other ethical considerations.
 References to the project as an example of how images can be used in teaching in
the concluding chapter of Working Images, a book in the EASA series (edited by
Sarah Pink, Laszlo Kurti and Ana Isabel) to be published by Routledge in 2004;
the website for this chapter will hopefully be linked to the project site.
 The project will be central to a presentation at the panel ‘Post observational
cinema – again’ at the ASA Decennial, ‘Anthropology and Science’ at
Manchester July 14-18 2003, and may be published.
 The film from the field school will also be distributed.
 Some publications about the collaboration with the Glamorgan field school and its
relationship to the visual project are expected.
 A field school website is in development and should become available during the
summer (to be announced in C-SAP news).
 The seminar presentation at UWS might also be published, possibly in Learning
and Teaching in the Social Sciences.
 We are considering the feasibility of packaging some of the CD ROMs onto a CD
ROM for distribution to every Anthropology Department in Britain.
Appendices
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Module outlines
Marking criteria and mark sheet
Handouts from scanning training
Handout for starting up digital editing using Purple
Student comments from module evaluations
Breakdown of results
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
30 June 2003
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