Episode 15: Developing more authentic graduate classroom assessments…taking risks and enhancing learning

Creating authentic classroom assessments are necessary for students to make more practical connections to their learning. We know that the use of performance assessments of experiential learning exercises tends to be less common in graduate classrooms and we don’t think it should be. In this episode, we discuss the experiences of an innovative-thinking instructor and how he went about developing and successfully implementing a four-day experiential learning exercise and performance assessment. His exercise focused on students applying the understandings of the Incident Command System team for the Alberta Agriculture and Forestry emergency response team to a realworld scenario about a Salmonella outbreak originating from a hatchery. We even get to hear a little about what happened in the classroom and from two observers who were present during the exercise. We are fortunate to have the instructor Dr. Simon Otto from the School of Public Health and a masters-level graduate student from his class Aleksandra Tymczak for our discussion today.