Here’s Cath’s lucid and engaging elevator pitch that we’ll be taking to the JISC Launch of Programme on Wednesday. We were asked to provide a 3 minute precis of the project to share with all the other participants and I think this sums up our project in a very neat nutshell. Nice one, Cath and Birmingham, here we come…

We are out at sea – and there are storm clouds of change on the horizon – funding cuts and an increasingly competitive market. Universities across the sector know they need to reduce costs and improve student satisfaction – but they’re like supertankers – hard to steer in the best of weathers. They are looking for ways to better manage student assessment, well aware that the paper-based systems they’ve been relying upon are simply not going to cut it anymore. They are needing to avoid the rocks of student disgruntlement, staff resistance and institutional inefficiency.

But in order to make good decisions about how to best avoid the rocks: how to manage student assessment electronically, senior managers need evidence of what sorts of electronic assessment management work best, are most cost effective and bring the greatest number of benefits to their students, their staff and their institutions. They also need advice and guidance on what needs to be done to support the implementation of these processes across their own institution.

The yacht Huddersfield has been sailing into the safe harbor of electronic assessment management for the last four years. Our project evaluates our experiences looking at both sustainability (enabling the evaluation of the process in an academic school over a long period of time) and scaleability (evaluating its use in a very large module with over 1000 students enrolled). We’re also evaluating how best to support the implementation of electronic assessment management in terms of student learning, staff development and institutional administrative systems so that the flairs of innovation don’t spark and die but are sustained and supported.

Our project is called EBEAM – the beam from a lighthouse, offering guidance and direction to help other institutions navigate their way into this safe harbor; to enable them to increase their efficiency and their agility, for academic staff to enjoy a reduced workload and increased job satisfaction, and for students to have more satisfactory course management experiences and to feel more supported in their learning.