It was great to meet up with Robyne Lovelock from ALDIS who represents Turnitin in Australia and the Pacific, and Travis Cox from the University of Melbourne today for a spot of pizza in Lygon St – the famous restaurant strip in Melbourne’s inner city. We spent a good hour or so talking electronic assessment management over pizza and pellegrino.  Some reflections on our conversations:

– Travis shares with me the concern that investing in home-grown tools to manage assessment can be a risky approach. The ongoing costs of sustaining these tools in the face of the development of proprietary systems is always going to be hard to maintain. And once an institution has invested (both financially and emotionally) in a tool that they’ve built, they become all the harder to jettison even if something better comes along. Making a decision to use proprietary tools for which institutions already hold licenses and finding ways to join them together (with work arounds and by making adjustments to regulations) is likely to be a more sustainable strategy than building something from scratch that does everything.

– I mentioned a problem we were facing with one of our institutional regulations and he suggested a potential solution that he knew about because he has administrative access to the Turnitin building block. It just goes to show that sharing experiences and queries between institutions is always going to be beneficial. This tiny piece of information will potentially save Huddersfield a lot of time and effort over the long run while also ensuring that our academic conduct procedures are more robust.