The University organised an Arena 51 afternoon, devoted to improving the Student Experience on Tuesday 10 January 2012: 1.00pm – 4.00pm. this was an ideal opportunity to share some of the preliminary findings of EBEAM with colleagues. I delivered a session explaining how we were using EAM in the School of Education and Professional Development and here’s a summary of the points raised in the consequent discussion…

Arena 51: The Student Experience Event

Session Title: Benefits of electronic assessment
Name of Convener: Cheryl Reynolds

Summary of conversation
Benefits:

• Less time collating work to mark
• Less chance that work is lost
• Submission doesn’t have to be f2f – convenience for distance students
• Sustainability (less paper)
• Quick marks (pre-written comments for common errors) free up time and cognitive space to give better feedback.
• Cohort wide data flags up where students are weak and this informs curriculum design.
• Sharing this data with the students helps them see their norm-referenced achievements and assures them of the importance we place on the assessment process.
• Illegible handwriting avoided
• And lots more

Caveats raised include:

• Difficulties presented to those members of staff who don’t touch type
• Preference for paper-based processes
• Investment of time needed at the outset to get to grips with the tool
• External regulatory bodies stipulations that preclude the kind of assessment that can be assessed through GradeMark (though it was pointed out that any type of assessment can be graded in GradeMark if the correct submission process is used.)

Wish List includes:

• Audio within GradeMark, though there is a way to do this through Unilearn (not GradeMark) described by Steve Bentley

Actions
Staff development session – hands on use of GradeMark Sue Folley is willing to organise this as a follow up to an earlier session that demonstrated GradeMark to staff.

Not agreed in the meeting but perhaps Steve would be willing to contribute some input on how to attach audio to UniLearn feedback, either to this session or to a separate one?

Feedback provided to Helen Walker in Staff Development who will convene meetings and make arrangements for the above actions.

Here’s a quick explanation of how we are beginning to think about using data generated through GradeMark in the School of Education and Professional Development as a tool for enhancing the curriculum and improving student achievement and progression…
Getting the most out of GradeMark

Dr Adele Flood kindly agreed to do a last minute seminar for us today. Dr Flood is from the University of New South Wales Learning & Teaching Unit. She is currently managing the University wide Assessment Project. Her current research takes two directions: in the first she is investigating ways of re-framing teaching practice to focus on student action in learning. The second is in response to an ongoing interest in Identity and creativity from the perspectives of both an educator and a practitioner.

Her presentation today focussed on how to create student centred assessment tasks that help position assessment as learning for students. She posed a series of questions that academics should ask themselves when developing assessment tasks for student learning. We explored two models of learning and Dr Flood showed how, by reframing the questions we ask, we can create assessment tasks that focus on student-action centred learning.

This is just good, sound assessment practice and applicable whether we’re discussing assessment via traditional media or in an electronic environment, so we see clear congruence and applicability of the strategies she highlighted with those we are already seeking to develop and evaluate in this project.

A big thank you to Dr Flood for her input today and we wish you a happy sojourn in the UK and a safe journey home : )

You can find Dr Flood’s full research profile here.

Yesterday I met with Sarah and Huw from Planning and Information Services to explore the technologies we’re using to collaborate on the project. Sarah and Huw will be supporting us with collating some of our large data sets, such as the National Student Survey data and our cohort demographics.

Despite a fire drill in the middle we had a look at both Twitter hashtags and GoogleDocs. The former as a way to give quick updates and share with a wider audience and the latter as a way to simultaneoulsy work on a single central copy of a document. Here’s the demo tweet we sent to illustrate how hashtags work…

A really positive spin off of this kind of project is the stimulus to share and try new things and it’s great that the same skills and tools we shared in the meeting will transfer well to another JISC project that Sarah and Huw are working on.

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.

We held our inaugural full team meeting today. It’s very exciting to be part of a strong team with such a broad range of skills and working contexts, all of us focussed on achieving something of value and importance to our University and the sector.

We reiterated our key aims, objectives and rationale and then reached broad agreement on roles and responsibilities.

We agreed on the use of SharePoint for version control with GoogleDocs for co-authoring of early drafts. We’ll use Office Communicator for synchronous chat and the Twitter tags #jiscassess and #jiscebeam, along with this blog for wider dissemination.

The next step is attendance at the JISC launch of programme event on 5th of October, which we anticipate will be enormously helpful as we continue to develop a more detailed project plan and evaluation strategy.