Students at the Faculty of Law can follow the extra curricular programme Law in Action. This programme is all about personal development. The lecturers do not want to grade the students on an ultimate goal or end product, they want to grade students on their development during the course.
To do this effectively, we have worked together with the lecturers and used the learning objectives to set up different subgoals divided in six categories. The learning objectives correspond to various skills that students can acquire at any time during the course which they have to work into a reflection. Students have to turn in the reflection in the Brightspace ePortfolio. De lecturers will give feedback on these reflections and – after some possible improvement or addition by the student – the lecturer will give the student the award that belongs to the achieved subgoal. Students have to get at least 15 out of 20 awards during the two year course, and at least one from every category.
The awards show the students in what categories they have evolved. Students can design their own development path using the categories. These awards show the lecturers how their students have passed the course’s assignments and learning objectives.
Every learning objective is connected to an award. Because of this, the course objective is very clear. This course objective gives the students a sense of direction, which is beneficial to most students. Another advantage of the awards is that the students were graded during the course and not at the end of the course. We hope that with this shift in grading, the students’ focus will shift from the end assessment to the course content and the process of learning. With this, the investment in the learning process will be optimized for both lecturers and students.
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