Multimedia assessment could include students creating any of a range of materials: posters, slides, audio/podcasts, video/films, photo-essays, documentary shorts, filmed interviews, digital storytelling, illustrations and visualisations.
Mutimedia assessment can provide alternatives to traditional written assessment or enhance and extend written assessment. Students can demonstrate higher-order learning in authentic and challenging contexts, present academic work for different audiences, and explore non-textual ways to communicate.
Most students will have access to phones, tablets or laptops and software that are able to capture, edit and publish to the web a variety of different video, audio, photographic and visual media. Additionally, there are dedicated photo and filmmaking kits available to borrow from the Eden Digital Education team.
Your departmental learning technology adviser, in the Eden Digital Education team, can discuss what tools are suitable and help you to identify positive aspects and pitfalls.
- Multimedia tasks can be a standalone assessment or be integrated alongside other assessment approaches, such as reflective written work, production diaries, reports or essays.
- They produce reusable assets for the use of future student cohorts.
- Students can develop broader communication skills, and consider how to tailor an academic argument to different media and audiences. Visual media are pervasive across corporate environments. Assessments can be shared publicly via online platforms and made available to prospective employers.
- Multimedia assessment also works well as a group activity (but the output could be an individual piece). Students can experience a variety of roles related to conception, research, planning, production and critique.
Any use of multimedia for assessment should offer students a basic introduction to aesthetic and visual theory. Many classic texts are available within LSE Library and can be added to your reading list.
Any unfamiliar assessment can be stressful for students, and impact attainment. Developing visual fluency and vocabulary is challenging, as are concrete creation skills (software use, audio editing, image manipulation). You can help through several approaches: introducing teaching activities which use similar skills; sharing examples of the outputs (at different levels of achievement, and with some commentary on their strengths and weaknesses); writing clear criteria and discussing/using them with students.
Generative AI could be used to create parts of this assessment output. Ensure students are aware of when Generative AI is permitted and useful, and when it cannot be used. You could help to ensure students are meeting the learning outcomes by: carrying out some work towards the assessment during contact time, with peer and academic discussion; including a question and answer session in the activity; requiring a rationale or reflective piece describing the process of creating the output; focusing marking criteria on higher levels of critique and analysis.
Images and video files have embedded metadata including time, date, location, capture device, author and copyright information which can be queried, if you suspect that students are submitting work they have not produced themselves.
Eden Digital Education Multimedia guides
Digital Skills and Digital Media - Examples of practice shared at the LSE Education Forum
LSE Language Centre: Students as news reporters
Pedagogic discussion and practical guidance on designing three forms of media assessments:
Kearney, M. (2011). A learning design for student‐generated digital storytelling. Learning, Media and Technology, 36(2), 169–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2011.553623
Schultz, P. L., & Quinn, A. S. (2013). Lights, Camera, Action! Learning About Management With Student-Produced Video Assignments. Journal of Management Education, 38(2), 234-258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562913488371 (Original work published 2014)
O’Neill, G. and Jennings, D. (2012) The use of posters for assessment: a guide for staff.
https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.brighton.ac.uk/dist/7/3977/files/2018/03/UCDTLA0039-1m0c51o.pdf