I’ve travelled up to Dundee for the eAssessment Scotland to present on the work of the project.

The day opened up with a keynote from David Boud from the University of Technology Sydney. I’m really excited to hear David speak as I’ve long admired his work. He started by challenging us to think carefully about what feedback really means in the context of assessment in Higher Education, suggesting that simply finding new strategies or trying to do it better isn’t going to solve the problem of feedback.

He suggested that some of the mechanisms we use (eg. Improving turnaround times) aren’t in themselves going to solve the problem. Instead, he proposed, we need to rethink what feedback is – specifically that we should think of it less in terms of input (what teachers do) to output (what students do with it). He said that feedback is one of the few times that the diversity of the student body is connected to the specificity of the curriculum.

David took his inspiration from the epistemological origins of feedback: biology and engineering. What intrigues me is how much of what he is suggesting in his generational models of feedback is just how unthinkable this is in terms of managing the process and the data. Finding ways to gather and channel the information flows is an important part of what he is proposing.

The final layer of the generational change is agentic: putting feedback in the hands of the students. One of the problems he identifies is how students calibrate their own judgement. Here, rather than simply being an adjunct to marking, it is now integral to all learning processes. Self-regulation is central to the process and, he suggested, something that needs to be introduced earlier to shift learning identity. It should be normal, for instance, for us to ask students: ‘what sorts of comments do you want on this piece?’

David turned to consider the theme of the conference: what can technology offer? The ones that stood out for me:
– Quick knowledge of results and calibration of judgement
– Knowledge of what has gone before. What have I told student before? What have other tutors told this student before? If they’ve been told this before, how can I explain it differently because explaining it the same way again is unlikely to work?
(I was really pleased at this point to hear David have a big go at anonymity! He made the point that anonymity is incompatible with the concept of feedback as he has conceptualised it.)

An absolutely superb keynote which really cuts to the heart of what we really need to think about.

In the next session I delivered a workshop on the EBEAM project and got some great questions. One of the delegates made the very important point about audio feedback and accents, with his lovely rich, thick Scottish accent. Accents are the new handwriting! It was great to have the opportunity to discuss these things with Scottish institutions. While they are facing some different challenges, their issues are also largely the same.

After lunch the second keynote was delivered by Russell Stannard from the University of Warwick. I’ve enjoyed Russell presenting before when I was invited to participate in a conference at Harper Adams. He has a real knack for making video feedback seem achievable and accessible. Today he went through the journey he’s been in to develop his practice and is refreshingly prepared to show his starting point and some of the early iterations of the work he has done.

Seeing him this time caused me to reflect on how the proposed developments of the Grademark tool will allow us to do many of the things that he advocates but also automatically returns it to the students. Russell made the point about dyslexic students finding the audio feedback really helpful but it is worth also thinking about whether students on the autistic spectrum might find it more difficult to engage with and interpret than written feedback. He also made the same point Diana Laurillard makes: that using both the auditory and visual channels is useful.

Russell’s stuff is great, but when I think about managing this with a cohort of more than, say, 30 students, my heart sinks. The fact that he manages so much of this through email means that it’s not scaleable to the size where you genuinely get economy of scale. The principles are all sound and exciting, but the administrative load that would come with it is huge. I suspect that technology will overtake his work. The next iteration of the audio tool in Grademark will do much of this. If there is also a channel for students to use to respond, then there is real potential for us to realise the vision that David Boud shared with us this morning.

The next session was a seminar presented by Sue Timmis from the Uni of Bristol and Steve Draper from the Uni of Glasgow. They reported on their research into eAssessment and the different understandings of what it means. Sue took us back to Rowntree’s 17 principles of good assessment. Sue talked about the role that assessment plays in terms of providing students with certificates for future employment as the elephant in the room. As Bloxham and Boyd point out, however, this is one of the four key reasons why we assess and this simply needs to be kept in balance with the other reasons.

Next we heard from Cherry Hopton and her students from Angus College. As Cherry says, what she’s doing isn’t particularly flash but it’s often the simple ideas which are the best. The idea of students making products which they share with each other is one that I subscribe to in my own practice and the benefits they’ve shared resonate with my own. Hearing from her students about their experience of using Facebook was really powerful. Their example of inter-cohort communication is, as I’ve discovered in my use of twitter, one of social networking. The fact that previous cohorts can send things through to and be in conversation with current students is brilliant.