WebPA wins Learning Impact award

At the Learning Impact conference, Loughborough University’s WebPA peer assessment system won a bronze award. It was also recognised as best in the assessment support category.

WebPA’s Nicola Wilkinson receives the award from IMS’ Lisa Mattson.

WebPA was the only UK entry in the field of twenty-three nominees from all over the world, gathered at the Omni Hotel in Austin, Texas. All the entries were judged in a grueling twenty-three rounds of five minute demos. Judged at the very end of that ordeal, the WebPA team still managed to impress the five judges. The preferences of all the other Learning Impact attendees counted as a sixth, collective judgment.

The Learning Impact awards are IMS’ means to recognise e-learning innovations that have made a palpable difference in a particular community. To ensure parity, a welter of categories and criteria ensures that there is a degree of comparability between entries of very different kinds, scales and levels of maturity. The awards form the centrepiece of the annual IMS public event, the Learning Impact conference.

WebPA is a mature, well developed system that supports the choreography of peer assessment in group work. Rather than simply award a blanket grade to every student in a project group, it allows student to grade each other’s efforts in any number of different criteria. The system is an open source webapplication that is getting deployed in an increasing number of institutions. Further development of the system is currently funded by the JISC.

There’s more Learning Impact news on the IMS website.
Learn more about WebPA on the Loughborough website