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A STEM-based faculty in an Australian university leveraged online educational technology to help address student and academic concerns associated with team-based assessment. When engagement and contribution of all team members cannot be assured, team-based assessment can become an unfair and inaccurate measure of student competency. This case study explores the design and capacity of an online self and intra-team peer-assessment of teamwork strategy to measure student engagement and enable peers to hold each other accountable during team-based assessments. Analysis of student interactions across 39 subjects that implemented the strategy in 2020, revealed that an average of 94.4% of students completed the self and intra-team peer-assessment task when designed as part of a summative team-based assessment. The analysis also revealed that an average of 10.3% of students were held accountable by their peers, receiving feedback indicating their teamwork skills and behaviours were below the required minimum standard. Furthermore, the strategy was successfully implemented in cohorts ranging from seven to over 700 students, demonstrating scalability. Thus, this online self and intra-team peer-assessment strategy provided teaching teams with evidence of student engagement in a team-based assessment while also enabling students to hold each other accountable for contributing to the team task. Lastly, as the online strategy pairs with any discipline-specific team-based assessment, it provided the faculty with a method that could be used consistently across its schools to support management and engagement in team-based assessments.

The aim of this study was to obtain a fundamental understanding of how running shoe midsole foam thickness contributes to footwear degradation using the heel and forefoot regions of traditional (TS) and minimalist (MS) running shoes. We hypothesized that ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) foam midsole material properties and footwear degradation performance under a biofidelic mechanical ageing protocol would differ as a function of shoe type and thickness. Attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectra indicated that the foam chemical compositions were similar and confirmed that all midsoles were composed of EVA copolymer. Differences in density and cell size were detected between shoes and thicknesses. MS foam was uniformly high density (ρMS= 240 kg/m3), while TS foam consisted of two co-molded layers with forefoot density (ρTS-FF= 250 kg/m3) greater than heel (ρTS-H= 160 kg/m3). Relative density and cell size values were generally proportional and inversely proportional to density, respectively. Degradation from mechanical ageing was greatest in the first 2 km of ageing, with the full ageing (21 km) resulting in an average 54% loss of energy absorption. Regardless of shoe type or foam microstructure, thicker and softer heel foams absorbed 83% more energy but degraded at a 49% faster rate. The fact that the heel degraded more rapidly than forefoot caused the drop to decrease at an equivalent rate for both shoe types. Overall, thickness was a greater predictor of average performance than microstructure variables for the present footwear conditions. However, the apparent drawback of thicker foam was exemplified by heel samples, which underwent a 1.4 mm greater loss of thickness and lost 550 mJ more energy absorption than forefoot samples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]