I’ve come down to Plymouth for the day to work with Lisa and Sarah from JISC and Emma from U of Wolverhampton to facilitate a workshop on electronic assessment and feedback with colleagues at Marjon UCP.

Lisa has gone over some of the findings from the baseline analysis that has been undertaken for the assessment and feedback strand. It’s caused me to reflect that one of the reasons we have been so successful in terms of assessment and feedback at the Uni of Huddersfield is because we have managed to make a lot of good decisions about involving students, keeping a focus on authentic design, emphasising timeliness and involving administrative staff throughout the process.

Talking to colleagues here it is once again clear that starting from the administrative environment has been one of the key aspects of our success. Paul Buckley’s principle of teamwork – what I tend to refer to as role clarity – is central.

There is a really clear sense emerging out of discussions today that institutional leadership is vital to the success of an EAM strategy.

It was great to hear from Emma Purnell at U of Wolverhampton about how PebblePad has been developed for EAM purposes. It includes a comment bank which can be shared across course teams and can have feedback forms added. It has Turnitin integration and has a kind of organic, built in early warning system in the form of milestones that haven’t been met.

She talked in some detail about patchwork assessment which is a brilliant example of assessment for (or as) learning. The list of different patchwork ‘blocks’ that have been used is really thought provoking and I can see the applicability of this for colleagues in many different disciplines.