Opening Interview
“Thinking and Knowing: Assessing What We Cannot See”

This highly interactive session will present multiple perspectives on measuring what is fundamentally difficult, to measure: Learning. Our best assessment practices and instruments must rely on indirect behavioral evidence that students are acquiring, integrating, and manipulating the content and skills we consider essential to our chosen disciplines. In light of this, how can we get the most accurate picture of what’s going on inside our students’ heads? What technological advances can we employ to increase the validity and reliability of these measures? Dr. Keith Willey and Dr. Susan Zvacek, both experienced educators and researchers, will discuss these topics (and more) in an engaging presentation format that welcomes input and questions from audience members.

The Interviewee

Associate Professor Keith Willey is the Leader of the Integrated Engineering Program, Co-director of the Faculty of Engineering Educational Innovation Unit and the Professor in Engineering Leadership Education at the University of Sydney, Australia. He began his academic career after 20 years in the Broadcast and Telecommunications industry. He has previously held engineering academic positions at the University of New South Wales and the University of Technology Sydney.

Keith an Australian Learning and Teaching fellow, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Senior Member of IEEE has been an international keynote speaker, visiting scholar and workshop facilitator. He has received an Engineers Australia excellence award, multiple awards for teaching and research and is a facilitator of the annual Australasian Association for Engineer Education Research Winter School.

Keith’s commitment to developing high quality teaching and learning practices is supported by his educational research published in numerous peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles. His research interests include the learning and assessment associated with working collaboratively and in teams, developing student’s judgement and professional identity, authentic assessment, the impact of assessment, self and peer review, collaboration, feed-forward and learning language on student’s competence, motivation, learning and development.

Keith is the Project Manager and lead developer of the collaborative learning and self and peer assessment software tool known as SPARK^PLUS that has been used worldwide by academic staff to facilitate learning activities for over 600,000 students.

The Interviewer

Dr. Susan M. Zvacek (CollegeTeachingCoach.com) is an independent consultant, speaker, and online teacher, focused on cultivating learning-centered teaching in higher education. She has more than 25 years of experience in higher education, including teaching, dissertation advising, and administration. Her appointments as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer and as a Distinguished Speaker for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) reflect her interest in STEM education, especially in the application of educational theory to instructional design. She has had two Fulbright appointments (Prague, CZ and Porto, PT) and has delivered keynotes, workshops, and conference presentations in the US and more than 10 European and Asian countries. Her publications are on topics such as course design, online learning, remote labs, and higher order thinking, including co-authoring Teaching and Learning at a Distance (currently in its 7^th edition) and the original Blackboard for Dummies, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and newsletter columns.

Recorded Interview