Last December, I was invited to examine the viva of EdD student Maureen Brennan at the University of Hertfordshire. At the time, like most vivas in the UK, it was planned to be an event where we were physically co-located. In the end, though, lockdown meant the event took place on 24 November this year via Microsoft Teams.
The internal examiner and I met online the day before the viva to be briefed on how things would work and how we could ask for help in the case of technical difficulties. I had to be photographed holding my passport, confirming my right to work in the UK. These right-to-work checks precede most UK vivas and usually have to take place in person, so it’s good that this year we are establishing they can be carried out perfectly well online.
On the day, the internal examiner and I met to agree how we’d divide our questions and which areas we’d focus on. We then took a break before coming back for the viva. At the end, Maureen and her supervisor left while we deliberated, and then returned to hear the good news that we were recommending a pass with only a small amount of corrections.
The Teams screen set-up doesn’t work as well for this sort of event as Zoom – the screenshot above shows the internal examiner, supervisor and candidate, with me very small in the bottom right. The Teams display shifts, depending on who is talking and who has spoken most recently.
Maureen’s thesis is on ‘The Use of Asynchronous Discussion To Support Collaborative Assessment in an Online Programme’. In it, she argues that student-to-student conversations in groups have a significant impact on learning. She used a case-study design to explore what was happening in an online collaborative group task. She found that group conversations had a significant impact on both individual and group achievement.
