Digital Assessment & Feedback: People, places and spaces

July 2018

This event continued the 2017 education theme of assessment and feedback linking with the Digital Lancaster agenda. Combining these strategic agendas provided an opportunity for us to discuss, debate and share practice on the role of technology in assessment and feedback in addition to how technology offers opportunities and challenges for people, practices and processes. We welcomed two external keynotes from different disciplines and a range of internal colleagues to share their expertise and experience of this debated area.

James Lamb

James Lamb was at this time an ESRC-funded PhD student within the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, where he is a tutor in Assessment, Learning and Digital Education and Education and Digital Cultures.

Multimodality, assessment and feedback
This presentation is concerned with multimodal assessment and feedback within our increasingly digital educational landscape. The proliferation of digital devices across society, alongside the widespread use of online learning spaces within education, has provided students, teachers and researchers with opportunities to communicate academic knowledge across image, sound and other modes beyond written and spoken language. This has potentially profound implications for assessment, particularly in courses and disciplines that have traditionally looked to the authority of words, whether on page or screen. How, for instance, do we make judgements of quality when a student represents their understanding across an orchestration of pictures, music and language? At the same time, when feedback is deeply implicated in assessment, should teachers be encouraged to communicate with students in overtly multimodal ways?

Watch James's presentation in full (45 minutes)

1: Introduction, multimodality, assessment and feedback (8 minutes)

2: Multimodality & representing academic knowledge (15 minutes)

3: Rationale for, and challenges of, multimodal assessment & feedback (10 minutes)

4: Strategies for supporting multimodal assessment & feedback (10 minutes)

5: Multimodal feedback & dialogue (10 minutes)

6: Conclusion & Questions (13 minutes)

Professor Sally Jordan

Sally Jordan has longstanding interests in assessment and feedback; she was the first academic at the Open University to use online interactive computer-marked assessment in her teaching, nearly 20 years ago. Since then Sally has advised extensively on the use of high quality computer-marked assessment for diagnostic, formative and summative purposes. She has led research projects, which have studied student engagement with computer-marked assessment and investigated the use of automatically marked short-answer questions. Sally is currently Head of the Open University’s School of Physical Sciences and thus less involved in day-to-day teaching and assessment. She regards this presentation as a critical but evidence-based “view from the edge”.

High quality computer-based assessment and computer-generated feedback: the answer to all our problems or impossible dream?
Online computer-marked assessment presents an opportunity to assess and provide personalised and immediate feedback to large classes, with savings of cost and greater consistency than human markers. It can motivate and engage students and provide information to educators about their students’ learning. However, concerns have been raised as to the validity and authenticity of assessment of this type, and not all students like being assessed in this way. Concerns have also been expressed as to the cost and time required to author high quality e-assessment items.

Watch Sally's presentation in full (60 minutes)

1: Introducation, high quality computer based assessment & computer generated feedback (13 minutes)

2: What the experts say (15 minutes)

3: What the students say (3 minutes)

4: Not all computer based assessment & feedback is the same (40 minutes)

5: Assessment in HE & questions (10 minutes)