The final part of the current JISC Assessment and Feedback Programme, Strand C provides support for technical development work to ‘package a technology innovation in assessment and feedback for re-use (with associated processes and practice), and support its transfer to two or more named external institutions’. This will see a number of innovative systems, including those developed over recent years with direct support from JISC, that have reached sufficient maturity adopted outside their originating institution and used to directly enhance teaching and learning.
The Open Mentor Technology Transfer (OMtetra) project will see The Open University’s Open Mentor system packaged and transferred to the University of Southampton and King’s College London. This unique system profiles tutor feedback to enhance the tutor’s ability to reflect on the feedback she provides, enhancing both the quality of the feedback students receive and the tutor’s own professional development and understanding.
QTI Delivery Interaction (QTIDI) led by the University of Glasgow in partnership with the Universities of Edinburgh, Southampton and Strathclyde, Kingston University and Harper Adams University College will package the JISC-funded MathAssessEngine – itself a development of earlier JISC-funded work – for deployment in the partner institutions through Moodle and other VLEs through the development of a thin Learning Tools Interoperability layer to launch assessments from within the VLE and return scores to the VLE gradebook. As the name suggests, this system will be fully compliant with the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) v2.1 specification.
Uniqurate is led by Kingston University, working in collaboration with the Universities of Southampton and Strathclyde, to produce and share a high quality QTI assessment content authoring system. Again building on extensive previous work in this area, the focus of this project will be to produce user friendly interfaces to allow newcomers to eassessment and those unfamiliar with QTI to easily and confidently create high quality interoperable content. As a sister project to QTIDI, the two project teams are working closely together to provide a suite of tools for interoperable eassessment.
The Rogo OSS project will see the University of Nottingham package their in-house eassessment system and support its implementation at De Montford University and the Universities of East Anglia, Bedford, Oxford and the West of Scotland. This is an extensive and mature open source system, with over seven years development and deployment behind it, supporting a wide range of question types, QTI import and export, support for LaTeX, foreign languages, accessibility, a range of multimedia formats, LDAP authentication, invigilator support and embedded workflows covering the range of activities within the eassessment lifecycle.
All four projects represent an exciting stage in the work JISC has been funding, directly and indirectly, for several years, and will see these tools becoming available to the wider and non-specialist HE community supported by detailed resources and lively and engaged user communities.