e-Assessment

I attended and presented at this years e-Assessment Scotland conference. I came back with lots of inspiration and ideas ready for the start of term so i thought I'd blog about what I took away from the day and how I'll be putting my thoughts into action. So here goes...

The keynote was my an old colleague and friend of mine Mr Peter Reed. You can view his slides and thoughts of the day on his blog. Pete delivered a really interesting keynote focusing around Brookfield's reflective lenses which encourages reflection through 4 lenses. These are self-reflection, students, literature and peers. In particular looking at assessment through the lenses of others and giving consideration to a host of factors when planning assessment. I found this really interesting and thought provoking when thinking about my own working context. So what am i going next? Well during the course of the next year I'm already planning a few events around e-Assessment and e-Feedback BUT I'm going to pop that on the back burner just for a very short while whilst I take on board Reedy's fantastic keynote. I'm going to re think my original sessions and target audience and I've been in touch with a few different members of staff within the faculty including programme administrators and unfair means officers. What I now want to do is involve some of our key stakeholders to ensure I'm understanding their perspectives when it comes to e-Assessment and involving them in informing some of these events and vice versa. I've also been thinking a lot more about the assessment lifecycle, assessment loading, high and low stakes assessment and how the planning of assessment in general can impact on the success of the assessment as a whole which again is something to consider when working with the various staff roles when planning new assessments.


I presented on emerging e-assessment practices, trends, techniques and tensions. I took a thematic approach as opposed to the usual case study approach and focused on three key areas in A-assessment. These were Collaborative e-Assessment, Portfolio based e-Assessment and e-Submission, e-Marking and e-Feedback. The presentation highlighted some of the emerging e-assessment practices being adopted within the faculty to address some of the challenges, this included the use of PebblePad for e-portfolio assessment, online submission and marking through Turnitin and Grademark and the use of Google apps for collaborative assessment and group work.


The other presentations on the day were varied and interesting and I met some new folk! Networking at a conference is always a big reason for me attending but it was nice to meet colleagues that were local to Scotland that I have never had the opportunity to meet before and have kept in touch about a few things since the conference! Also, although quite often we don't take advantage of a lot of the sponsor's stalls at these things, I really did and got some useful information from some of them in relation to developments within my faculty.

And finally, I got to visit Dundee! I stayed next to this lovely boat (pay no attention to the danger sign, i didn't!)






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Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

MELSIG MMU "Smart Devices for Learning'

Last week I attended MELSIG which was held at Manchester Metropolitan University. I just wanted to highlight some of the key things I took away from the day. The event focus was around 'smart devices for learning', topic that's been growing in interest and use for some time now. What I quite like about MELSIG is that you tend to get a good mix of speakers that are currently undertaking projects directly with students and also you tend to pick up some useful app ideas.

So... My fave presentation was by Simon Thomson Head of eLearning at Leeds Met. I picked up a handy little 'smart device' that they've been using called a 'chatterbox', a fairly old school device used in my youth to direct truth or dare questions. Anyway, Simon has been using them with staff and has stripped them of all truth or dare questions, lucky for them! Instead the chatterbox has been replaced with tools to enhance teaching and learning and ways in which they can be used within teaching. As luck would have it I am in the midst of organising a session for staff around designing online learning activities. I'm definitely going to be using this chatterbox with staff as a conversation starter.

Something else i picked up was a company called Spritz who focus on developing text streaming technology and it's integration into modern technology. So the ability to be able to read moving/ streaming text as opposed to fixed text that you need to scroll through on an app would be quicker, more comfortable and easier. One to look out for i think! (Get it?.... 'Look' out for?!!)


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Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

The Future of Feedback

Some months ago i presented at The Future of Audio Feedback event at Sheffield Hallam University (in collaboration with the HEA). The event was aimed at those that were quite new to the concept of audio feedback and provided examples of practice and feedback from students who had been utilising audio feedback.

Myself and a colleague Jo Stroud, e-Learning Officer from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine presented the workshop 'Future Feedback... Supported by Technology' (see short abstract below)

Media-enhanced feedback is becoming ever easier to produce, with the growing prominence of affordable and powerful mobile devices reducing our reliance on institutionally-supplied hardware and software. This session will look at some of the free or cheaply available tools and applications accessible to anyone with an interest in creating richer electronic feedback.

The session looked at a mish mash of tools that could be used to deliver feedback to your students using just what you have on your PC/Laptop without having to install or buy anything new, bonus! I re-jigged the session and delivered it to the department of Human Communication Sciences (HCS) a few weeks ago. HCS have been selected to be involved in an institutional wide project on feedback called 'Flexible Formative F3edback' which is aims to gather expectation and experiences of feedback across all faculties. 

There's been some interest from staff in using free tools to enhance and engage students in feedback. There's a lot of widespread use of Turnitin within the faculty at present and many people using Grademark to deliver feedback taking advantage of the ability to annotate online scripts using Quickmark comments, leave detailed free text feedback, audio feedback and also provide a linked marking criteria (rubric). One aspect we (and everyone else no doubt) are struggling to overcome is Grademark's inability to accommodate blind/second marking however this doesn't effect everyones marking practices and is something on the Turnitin/Grademark roadmap to be addressed in the future.

For now i think encouraging using a variety of technology enhanced methods to support feedback is the way forward as it offers more flexibility and freedom. I'm also going to be supporting the use of Grademark within departments, next stop! ScHARR Bitesize on the 7th May 'Online Marking through Turnitin & Grademark'

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.