Enhancing writing and oral presentation skills through e Self-assessment

Voyce Li
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong SAR, China

E Self-evaluation is an online methodology for enhancing students' ability to think and analyse their writing and oral presentation by themselves and build up their capacity to improve their work through their class teachers' feedback on both their submissions and self-evaluations.

This paper shows how the methodology has been applied in an English learning programme for engineering students at a university in Hong Kong. This programme features e Self-evaluation on an open-source e-learning platform, and the paper demonstrates the workflow of students' tasks, the interaction between students and teachers, and the monitoring steps for indicating students' progress. Instead of giving guidelines for students to follow, e Self-evaluation leads them to think over the criteria for each assignment in order to meet the requirements. Also discussed are the learning outcomes through reflection on a research project being completed by the end of the semester. The project will collect students' feedback on their level of satisfaction, the usability of the interfaces, and the effectiveness of independent online learning through e Self-evaluation for a review of the programme.

The rationale behind e Self-evaluation derives from the idea of computer system self-diagnosis procedures. For the health of the whole system, a series of procedures have to be carried out regularly to check the status of each component in the system. Based on the recorded status of each component, the system has the ability to learn from the system administrator for enhancing performance on it.