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.

Where the JISC Assessment and Feedback Programme Strand A projects are focused on identifying and introducing new assessment and feedback processes and practices, the Strand B Evidence and Evaluation projects are reviewing the impact and implications of innovations and transformations that have already taken place, and exploring how these can be extended to new contexts and environments.  These eight projects cover a broad range of approaches and will provide invaluable insight into the value of such changes for institutions, learners and staff.

The EFFECT: Evaluating feedback for elearning: centralised tutors project at the University of Dundee will examine the success of esubmission and their TQFE-Tutor system, a centralised email account, blog and microblog supporting their online PDP programme for tertiary tutors.  The project aimed to significantly increase response times and teaching quality through the use of this centralised system, as well as providing opportunities for peer interaction and collaboration for both students and staff.  As well as rigorously evaluating the impact of the programme, EFFECT will produce valuable guidance on how to adapt the system for implementation by other institutions and courses.

Student-Generated Content for Learning (SGC4L) at the University of Edinburgh is evaluating the impact of PeerWise, a freely available web based system which not only allows students to author questions for sharing with their peers but also supports extensive social discussion tools around that content, providing a greatly enhanced learning experience that students have responded to enthusiastically.  The project will emphasise the production of generic information that will be applicable across a wide range of subject areas and institutional contexts.

OCME: Online Coursework Management Evaluation, based at the University of Exeter, is rolling out and evaluating a fully paperless coursework management system, involving the integration of Moodle and Turnitin.  This will inform the development of best practice guidelines for the deployment and management of online assessment.

The problems of assignment bundling and timeliness of feedback are being considered by the Evaluation of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark at the University of Glamorgan project.  This project will be evaluating the use of student diaries to highlight to both staff and students when assignments are due to encourage good time management and planning.  The project is also looking at the use of GradeMark, an online grading system available as part of Turnitin, to provide timely, personalised and high quality feedback on assignments.

Evaluating the Benefits of Electronic Assessment Management (EBEAM) at the University of Huddersfield is also looking at the impact of Turnitin and GradeMark on student satisfaction, retention, progression and institutional efficiency.  This project will benefit from their early adoption of the systems to provide detailed insights and recommendations for their implementation in a wide range of subject areas and across different institutions.

The University of Hertfordshire’s Evaluating Electronic Voting Systems for Enhancing Student Experience (EEVS) project will provide an exhaustive examination of the use, benefits and best practice around the use of electronic voting systems in formative and summative assessment.

The eFeedback Evaluation Project (eFEP) builds on The Open University’s extensive experience in providing distance learning to explore the use of written and spoken feedback in modern language studies.  The value of such feedback in face-to-face courses will be examined through deployment in similar classes at the University of Manchester.  Detailed reports on the value of different feedback techniques together with training resources for staff and students will provide valuable advice for other institutions considering adopting such approaches.

The University of Westminster’s Making Assessment Count Evaluation (MACE) project builds on the success of the Making Assessment Count project which will be familiar to those who attended our joint event with them this February.  This project will not only evaluate the impact of the MAC eReflect self-review questionnaire within Westminster, but also pilot implementations at six other institutions including the transformation of the MAC SOS (Subject, Operational and Strategic) feedback principles into Moodle and GradeBook at City University, London.  By demonstrating the effectiveness of the system in a wide variety of subject areas and institutional contexts, the project will provide a valuable resource for those considering adopting the system.

JISC has a long tradition of providing support and encouragement for innovative assessment activities, recognising the crucial role assessment plays in education and the significant concerns about the current state of university assessment and feedback repeatedly revealed by the National Student Survey, stimulus for the National Union of Students’ recent high profile Feedback Amnesty campaign.

Their latest work in this area is focused on a substantial programme of projects funded under the three strands of the current Assessment and Feedback Programme, covering institutional change, evidence and evaluation, and technology transfer.  The twenty projects that successfully bid for funding under this programme address a wide range of assessment and feedback processes and educational contexts, illustrated by Grainne Hamilton’s excellent Storified account of the programme start up meeting earlier this month.  These projects are focused on using technology to increase the quality and efficiency of assessment and feedback practice on a large scale.  Crucially, there is a strong element of sharing running throughout the programme, both in supporting the transfer of technology to new institutions, and in sharing outcomes and learning from previous work to help support future practice – literally feeding forward to the future.

Strand A focuses on institutional change, with the eight projects funded reviewing and revising assessment and feedback processes and practices, and using technology to support major changes and best practice in their chosen area.

Feedback and Assessment for Students with Technology (FASTECH) is working with the Higher Education Academy-funded Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (TESTA) project to implement technology-enhanced assessment and feedback processes in a large number of degree programmes at Bath Spa and Winchester Universities.  The project will learn about the approaches teachers and learners take to assessment and how technology can be used to affect this.  In addition, a range of resources and support will be made available to support practitioners in transforming individual and institutional practice.

COLLABORATE: working with employers and students to design assessment enhanced by the use of digital technologies at the University of Exeter is focused on employability issues, and on ensuring that assessment is designed with students’ future career prospects firmly in mind.  The project is structured around a series of collaborations: with employers, with programme and institutional teams, and with students and recent graduates, redesigning assessment to ensure that it is pedagogically sound and realistic in preparing students for life beyond graduation.

FAST (Feedback and Assessment Strategy Testing) led by Cornwall College is facing the intriguing issue of embedding technology-supported assessment in a geographic area which lacks full broadband roll out and with students whose ability to physically visit the college campus is limited by poor transport links or employment.  A small-scale pilot on a small cohort in a single campus will be followed with full scale roll out in a Personal and Employability Development module studied by over 700 students on 43 different courses in seven different campuses.  The information on technical and support issues encountered and methods adopted to overcome them will be disseminated to the wider community, as will model CPD packages for potential adoption in other institutions.

InterACT at the University of Dundee is also dealing with a rather unique student cohort.  Providing continuing education and CPD for practicing doctors, their courses are entirely distance taught and, crucially, the timing of assessment submission is entirely at the discretion of the individual student.  This leads to issues around timeliness of feedback and feed forward, which may have an impact on learner satisfaction and, subsequently, on retention.  This project will examine the ways in which a range of technologies such as blogs, FriendFeed, VOIP, webinars and chat tools can enable personalised, timely and focused feedback that encourages reflection and engagement, and enhances the student experience.

The timeliness and effectiveness of feedback is also a focus of the Integrating Technology-Enhanced Assessment Methods (iTEAM) project at the University of Hertfordshire, which is exploring the ways in which electronic voting systems and increased embedding of QuestionMark Perception can be used to provide prompt personalised feedback.  A student dashboard will be developed to integrate information from EVS, QMP, the institution’s Managed Learning Environment (MLE) and other relevant sources to provide a central point for information on a student’s performance across all subjects, enabling personal tutors to provide meaningful and personalised support and students to better understand their own learning behaviours.

The Institute of Education’s Assessment Careers: enhancing learning pathways through assessment project will explore the construction of assessment frameworks, incorporating multi-stage assessment and structured feedback and feed forward.  There is a strong emphasis on assessment as an holistic whole rather than single, stand-alone events, with assessment instances part of a larger learning journey rather than marking the end point of a phase of study.  The framework will be piloted in a number of Masters modules, with learner and tutor experiences then informing the model as it is scaled up for use on an institutional level.

TRAFFIC: TRansforming Assessment + Feedback for Institutional Change at Manchester Metropolitan University builds on MMU’s work in the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programme to implement an institution-wide assessment transformation programme.  The project will undertake an extremely thorough review of assessment across the institution, explore ways in which technology can enhance and support assessment and feedback processes, and provide a very rich range of resources for the broader community.

eAFFECT: eAssessment and Feedback for Effective Course Transformation is the culmination of a range of activities examining assessment and feedback processes undertaken recently at Queen’s University Belfast.  The project will examine staff and student approaches to assessment, in particular addressing concerns about workload, learning styles and how technology can support transformation in assessment processes.  A practice-based website and extensive supporting documentation will help individual practitioners and institutional change managers apply the lessons of this project to their own contexts.