E-Assessment in Wales

Background

Providing a flexible, student-centred learning experience across Wales remains a key part of the Welsh Assembly agenda. Reaching Higher recognises the role that new technology can play in sustaining a ‘learning society’, both in terms of the learner experience, and in economic terms through reusability:

“HE needs to ensure that there is flexibility of delivery of courses, with HE provision in FE…Artificial barriers between FE and HE must be removed”

 Formative and summative assessment is now recognised as the most important and fundamental aspect of the learning process. Becta’s recent analysis for the learning and skills sectors concludes that e-assessment provides the flexibility for learners to strengthen their understanding of key concepts, and to formally demonstrate that understanding at a time right for them.

 The University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC) has long held strong partnerships with colleges in the South East Wales region. Like many courses nationwide across the FE and HE sectors, retention has been identified as a key issue, as has the requirements of effective and timely student feedback. Work has begun to identify possible critical moments when some sort of intervention might make a large positive difference on the student experience. One sort of intervention might well be e-assessment in the form of formative feedback, for instance.

 The HE Academy has recognised the degree to which e-assessment could help support universities and colleges in addressing these issues; recognising also the need for effective curriculum design if assessment of any sort is to remain a beneficial part of the learning and teaching process.

 Although a number of franchised courses continue to utilise UWIC’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), it has been recognised that far more could be done to support such courses through the deployment of effective ICT. In particular, UWIC (see below), the franchise colleges and HEFCW recognise that much could be achieved in the area of e-assessment.

 Currently, UWIC supports e-assessment through its VLE (Blackboard), and has achieved some notable pockets of excellence, although the use of Blackboard to support assessment within the franchise colleges has been limited. However, the recent purchase of QuestionMark Perception (QMP) has, for the first time, provided the University and its franchise partners with a powerful proprietary e-assessment tool.

 The project, E-Assessment in Wales, seeks to use QMP as a foundation from which to explore how e-assessment can be used most effectively to support the learning and teaching of a course delivered at a franchise college, addressing key issues including retention, student feedback and effective curriculum design. The project will allow practitioners to develop and deploy tests within a low risk context, but one fully supported and evaluated by the project team.

Aspects to be explored include

 the degree to which objective testing can support higher order learning (such as analysis and synthesis, as identified in Bloom’s taxonomy);

• a better understanding of what constitutes good curriculum design for such interventions;
• the role of e-assessment within e-portfolios;
• and the student experience.

However, more generally, the project will be analysing the issues of deploying e-assessment interventions, diagnostically and formatively in the first instance, but perhaps even summatively if considered appropriate.

The project acknowledges the increased risk attendant with any form of ICT intervention; in its first year (2007/8) the project will focus on a tight cohort of courses, possibly one or two; this will be expanded as appropriate for the following year 2008/9.

It should be noted that the focus of the project remains the learning and teaching issues associated with effective deployment of e-assessment, rather than an analysis of software or hardware, or the construction of shareable question banks (QMP comes with its own shareable bank which will be adequate for the project).

 As a result of the project, it is expected that tutors will gain 

• a greater understanding of what constitutes good e-assessment intervention, both diagnostically and formatively;
• an understanding of how and to what degree e-assessment can support higher order learning, as well as how it can address the issues of student retention and student feedback;
• a better understanding of good curriculum design for better e-assessment interventions;
• an understanding of the relation between e-assessment and e-portfolios;
• an understanding of QMP and what it can potentially offer the learning process.