I’m now in Sydney, settled in at the Learning and Teaching Unit at the University of New South Wales (I’m babysitting the office of Adele Flood). It’s great to be here and meeting some of the folks who work here, but it’s also interesting to discover that UNSW, like the University of Melbourne, are still heavily invested in paper-based assessment management systems. It seems that UNSW has a lot of different systems being used across different Faculties to provide feedback to students in interesting ways, but for the most part paper-based submission, marking and return seems to prevail. I’m growing increasingly convinced that the problem we are facing in the UK of needing to move towards Electronic Assessment Management is more widespread than I had originally envisaged.

The UNSW Teaching Website has a particularly rich set of resources under the heading of ‘Assessment‘ which are consistently focused on reinforcing the message about assessment as learning. I really like this turn of phrase (as distinct from assessment of learning and assessment for learning) and as Cheryl mentioned in an earlier post, was something Adele Flood used when she came to Huddersfield to speak last year.  The help sheet on Using Assessment Rubrics also caught my eye as being particularly useful, balanced and helpful and has particular application to building and using rubrics within Grademark. This chimes with one of the toolkits we’re preparing as an output for this project.

I’m looking forward to picking the brains of the good folks at this fine institution, but also hope that some of the ideas and experience we’ve generated as part of the EBEAM project can be of use to those who want to make the move away from paper-based assessment management methods here.